Opinion Dynamics with Heterogeneous Interactions and Information Assimilation

Opinion Dynamics with Heterogeneous Interactions and Information Assimilation Anahita MirTabatabaei In any modern society, individuals interact to form opinions on various topics, including economic, political, and social aspects. Opinions evolve as the result of the continuous exchange of information among individuals and of the assimilation of information distributed by media. The impact of the individuals’ opinions on each other forms a network, and as the time progresses, their opinions change as a function of structure of such network. It is a central question whether this interaction and assimilation process leads to a socially beneficial aggregation of information. Considering a large population allows approximation of the decision making rules with Non-Bayesian “rule of thumb” methods without relying on detailed social psychological findings. This thesis mainly addresses complex problems in the analysis of opinion evolution in (a) heterogeneous societies and (b) societies with large population under the influence of exogenous events. In the study of opinion dynamics in heterogeneous social networks, we modeled the system as follows: the neighbors of each agent can be defined as either (1) those agents whose opinions are in its confidence range, or (2) those agents whose