A model of anonymous influence with anti-conformist agents

We study a stochastic model of anonymous influence with conformist and anti-conformist individuals. Each agent with a ‘yes' or ‘no' initial opinion on a certain issue can change his opinion due to social influence. We consider anonymous influence, which depends on the number of agents having a certain opinion, but not on their identity. An individual is conformist/anti-conformist if his probability of saying ‘yes' increases/decreases with the number of ‘yes'- agents. In order to consider a society in which both conformists and anti-conformists co-exist, we investigate a generalized aggregation mechanism based on ordered weighted averages. Additionally, every agent has a coefficient of conformism which is a real number in [-1, 1], with negative/positive values corresponding to anti-conformists/conformists. The two extreme values -1 and 1 represent a pure anti-conformist and a pure conformist, respectively, and the remaining values - so called ‘mixed' agents. We consider two kinds of a society: without mixed agents, and with mixed agents who play randomly either as conformists or anti-conformists. For both cases of the model, we deliver a qualitative analysis of convergence, i.e., find all absorbing classes and conditions for their occurence.

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