Influencing Opinions of Heterogeneous Populations over Finite Time Horizons
Provides theoretical guidance for political campaigns and social influence strategies in heterogeneous populations over fixed deadlines.
The paper proposes a generalized voter model to capture heterogeneous opinion dynamics and characterizes optimal influencing strategies over finite time horizons, showing that the timing of influence depends on the population type: late influence for strong-willed/rebel individuals, early influence for conformists.
In this work, we focus on strategies to influence the opinion dynamics of a well-connected society. We propose a generalization of the popular voter model. This variant of the voter model can capture a wide range of individuals including strong-willed individuals whose opinion evolution is independent of their neighbors as well as conformist/rebel individuals who tend to adopt the opinion of the majority/minority. Motivated by political campaigns which aim to influence opinion dynamics by the end of a fixed deadline, we focus on influencing strategies for finite time horizons. We characterize the nature of optimal influencing strategies as a function of the nature of individuals forming the society. Using this, we show that for a society consisting of predominantly strong-willed/rebel individuals, the optimal strategy is to influence towards the end of the finite time horizon, whereas, for a society predominantly consisting of conformist individuals who try to adopt the opinion of the majority, it could be optimal to influence in the initial phase of the finite time horizon.