Opinion formation using the g¨ur game

Abstract

Opinion leaders with different degrees of influence may lead to different outcomes when seeking support from their followers. In this paper, we present the opinion leaders with high trustworthiness or the effective persuasion tactics will gain the desired proportion of support from followers sooner in the Gür game framework. The composition of followers in a group affects the time to achieve the target proportion of support as well. The Gür game is a self-organized artificial game associating players with finite state automata and a moderator with a reward function. We regard each follower as a player associating with a finite state automaton to reflect their states of mind. An opinion leader, considered as a moderator, has a reward function to reflect his/her degree of influence and to predict the probability of followers changing their state of mind after he/she delivers a speech or comments on a topic or a product.