Collective Opinion Formation as a Set of Intelligent Agents to Achieve the Goal

Aim. The use of intelligent agents in modeling an integrated information system of transport logistics makes it possible to achieve a qualitatively new level of design of control systems in supply chains. Materials and methods. The article presents an original approach that implements the possibilities of using multi-agent technologies in the interests of modeling the processes of functioning of an integrated information system of transport logistics. It is shown that the multi-agent infrastructure is actually a semantic shell of the information system, refl ecting the rules of doing business and the interaction of its participants in the supply chains. The characteristic of the model of the class of an intelligent agent, which is basic for solving problems of management of transport and technological processes, is given. Results. The procedures of functioning of the model of integration of information resources of the participants of the transport services market on the basis of intelligent agents are considered. The presented procedures provide a wide range of network interaction operations in supply chains, including traffi c and network structure “fl exible” control, mutual exchange of content and service information, as well as their distributed processing, and information security. Conclusions. The proposed approach showed that the use of intelligent agents in modeling the functioning of an integrated information system makes it possible to take into account the peculiarities of transport and technological processes in supply chains, such as the integration of heterogeneous enterprises, their distributed organization, an open dynamic structure, standardization of products, interfaces and protocols.

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Information Aggregation Properties of Opinion Formation in Social Networks

SSRN Electronic Journal ◽

10.2139/ssrn.1937088 ◽

2011 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Manuel Mueller-Frank

Keyword(s):

Social Networks ◽

Information Aggregation ◽

Opinion Formation

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Elite Hacking: Public Opinion Formation and Elite Fragmentation

SSRN Electronic Journal ◽

10.2139/ssrn.3400997 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Jesse Clark ◽

Zeyu Chris Peng

Keyword(s):

Public Opinion ◽

Opinion Formation

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Conclusion

10.1093/oso/9780198792130.003.0013 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Harald Schoen ◽

Sigrid Roßteutscher ◽

Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck ◽

Bernhard Weßels ◽

Christof Wolf

Keyword(s):

Political Behavior ◽

Voting Behavior ◽

Contextual Effects ◽

Democratic Politics ◽

Voter Behavior ◽

Future Research ◽

Opinion Formation ◽

Context Sensitive ◽

Contextual Features ◽

And Behavior

This concluding chapter summarizes the main findings of the preceding chapters in light of the model of contextual effects on voter behavior. Accordingly, the processes of communication and politicization are of key importance for contextual effects. By implication, we cannot take for granted that contextual features exert sizable effects on voters’ opinion formation and behavior in each and every case. Findings about contextual effects are also context-sensitive and thus do not lend themselves to generalization by default. These observations suggest that context plays a nuanced and conditional role in voting behavior. Exploring it further should be a focal topic of future research on political behavior and democratic politics.

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Voters and Voting in Context

10.1093/oso/9780198792130.003.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Harald Schoen ◽

Sigrid Roßteutscher ◽

Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck ◽

Bernhard Weßels ◽

Christof Wolf

Keyword(s):

Voting Behavior ◽

Contextual Effects ◽

First Century ◽

Sources Of Information ◽

Opinion Formation ◽

Contextual Features ◽

Early Twenty ◽

Methodological Approaches ◽

Rich Data ◽

Theoretical Issues

After a brief review of the scholarly discussion about the idea that context affects political behavior, this chapter proposes a model for the analysis of contextual effects on opinion formation and voting behavior. It highlights theoretical issues in the interplay of various contextual features and voter predispositions in bringing about contextual effects on voters. This model guides the analyses of contextual effects on voter behavior in Germany in the early twenty-first century. These analyses draw on rich data from multiple voter surveys and various sources of information about contextual features. The chapter also gives an overview of different methodological approaches and challenges in the analysis of contextual effects on voting behavior.

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Opinion Dynamics Optimization by Varying Susceptibility to Persuasion via Non-Convex Local Search

ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data ◽

10.1145/3466617 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 16 (2) ◽

pp. 1-34

Author(s):

Rediet Abebe ◽

T.-H. HUBERT Chan ◽

Jon Kleinberg ◽

Zhibin Liang ◽

David Parkes ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Local Search ◽

Objective Function ◽

Iterative Process ◽

Large Scale ◽

Opinion Dynamics ◽

Theoretical Models ◽

Global Optimum ◽

Local Optimum ◽

Opinion Formation ◽

Long Line

A long line of work in social psychology has studied variations in people’s susceptibility to persuasion—the extent to which they are willing to modify their opinions on a topic. This body of literature suggests an interesting perspective on theoretical models of opinion formation by interacting parties in a network: in addition to considering interventions that directly modify people’s intrinsic opinions, it is also natural to consider interventions that modify people’s susceptibility to persuasion. In this work, motivated by this fact, we propose an influence optimization problem. Specifically, we adopt a popular model for social opinion dynamics, where each agent has some fixed innate opinion, and a resistance that measures the importance it places on its innate opinion; agents influence one another’s opinions through an iterative process. Under certain conditions, this iterative process converges to some equilibrium opinion vector. For the unbudgeted variant of the problem, the goal is to modify the resistance of any number of agents (within some given range) such that the sum of the equilibrium opinions is minimized; for the budgeted variant, in addition the algorithm is given upfront a restriction on the number of agents whose resistance may be modified. We prove that the objective function is in general non-convex. Hence, formulating the problem as a convex program as in an early version of this work (Abebe et al., KDD’18) might have potential correctness issues. We instead analyze the structure of the objective function, and show that any local optimum is also a global optimum, which is somehow surprising as the objective function might not be convex. Furthermore, we combine the iterative process and the local search paradigm to design very efficient algorithms that can solve the unbudgeted variant of the problem optimally on large-scale graphs containing millions of nodes. Finally, we propose and evaluate experimentally a family of heuristics for the budgeted variant of the problem.

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