Analysis and control of agreement and disagreement opinion cascades

• DOI: 10.1007/s11721-021-00190-w
• Publication Date: 2021-05-21T06:02:25Z
• Authors: Alessio Franci; Anastasia Bizyaeva; Shinkyu Park; Naomi Ehrich Leonard
• Keywords: 0301 basic medicine; Physics - Physics and Society; 0303 health sciences; 03 medical and health sciences; Optimization and Control (math.OC); FOS: Mathematics; FOS: Physical sciences; Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph); Mathematics - Optimization and Control

We introduce and analyze a continuous time and state-space model of opinion cascades on networks of large numbers of agents that form opinions about two or more options. By leveraging our recent results on the emergence of agreement and disagreement states, we introduce novel tools to analyze and control agreement and disagreement opinion cascades. New notions of agreement and disagreement centrality, which depend only on network structure, are shown to be key to characterizing the nonlinear behavior of agreement and disagreement opinion formation and cascades. Our results are relevant for the analysis and control of opinion cascades in real-world networks, including biological, social and artificial networks, and for the design of opinion-forming behaviors in robotic swarms. We illustrate an application of our model to a multi-robot task-allocation problem and discuss extensions and future directions opened by our modeling framework.