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Digital Library of the
European Council for Modelling and Simulation |
Title: |
Hierarchical
Consensus Formation Reduces The Influence Of Opinion Bias |
Authors: |
Nicolas Perony, René Pfitzner, Ingo Scholtes, Claudio J. Tessone, Frank Schweitzer |
Published in: |
(2012).ECMS
2012 Proceedings edited by: K. G. Troitzsch, M. Moehring, U. Lotzmann.
European Council for Modeling and Simulation. doi:10.7148/2012 ISBN:
978-0-9564944-4-3 26th
European Conference on Modelling and Simulation, Shaping reality through simulation Koblenz,
Germany, May 29 – June 1 2012 |
Citation
format: |
Perony, N., Pfitzner, R.,
Scholtes, I., Tessone, C. J., & Schweitzer, F. (2012). Hierarchical
Consensus Formation Reduces The Influence Of Opinion Bias. ECMS 2012
Proceedings edited by: K. G. Troitzsch, M. Moehring, U.
Lotzmann (pp. 662-668). European Council for Modeling and Simulation. doi:10.7148/2012-0662-0668 |
DOI: |
http://dx.doi.org/10.7148/2012-0662-0668 |
Abstract: |
We
study the role of hierarchical structures in a sim- ple model of collective consensus
formation based on the bounded confidence model with continuous individ- ual
opinions. For the particular variation of this model considered in this
paper, we assume that a bias towards an extreme opinion is introduced
whenever two individ- uals interact and form a common decision. As a simple
proxy for hierarchical social structures, we introduce a two-step decision
making process in which in the sec- ond step groups of like-minded
individuals are replaced by representatives once they have reached local
consen- sus, and the representatives in turn form a collective de- cision in
a downstream process. We find that the intro- duction of such a hierarchical
decision making structure can improve consensus formation, in the sense that
the eventual collective opinion is closer to the true average of individual
opinions than without it. In particular, we numerically study how the size of
groups of like-minded individuals being represented by delegate individuals
af- fects the impact of the bias on the final population-wide consensus.
These results are of interest for the design of organisational policies and
the optimisation of hierarchi- cal structures in the context of group
decision making. |
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