Strategic disclosure of opinions on a social network
This provides a theoretical framework for analyzing social influence dynamics, but it is incremental as it builds on existing game theory and network models.
The paper introduces games of influence, a new class of infinite repeated games with incomplete information, to model strategic opinion disclosure on social networks, showing how trust network structure affects agent behavior using game-theoretic concepts like Nash equilibrium.
We study the strategic aspects of social influence in a society of agents linked by a trust network, introducing a new class of games called games of influence. A game of influence is an infinite repeated game with incomplete information in which, at each stage of interaction, an agent can make her opinions visible (public) or invisible (private) in order to influence other agents' opinions. The influence process is mediated by a trust network, as we assume that the opinion of a given agent is only affected by the opinions of those agents that she considers trustworthy (i.e., the agents in the trust network that are directly linked to her). Each agent is endowed with a goal, expressed in a suitable temporal language inspired from linear temporal logic (LTL). We show that games of influence provide a simple abstraction to explore the effects of the trust network structure on the agents' behaviour, by considering solution concepts from game-theory such as Nash equilibrium, weak dominance and winning strategies.