Understanding How Dominance Affects the Emergence of Agreement in a Social Network: The Case of Naming Game

摘要

We study the dynamics of the Naming Game as an opinion formation model on social networks. This agent-based model captures the essential features of the agreement dynamics by means of a memory-based negotiation process. Our study focuses on the impact of dominance of certain opinions over others in pursuit of faster agreement on social networks. We propose two models to incorporate dominance of the opinions. We observe that both these models lead to faster agreement among the agents on an opinion as compared to the base case reported in the literature. We perform extensive simulations on computer-generated networks as well as on a real online social network (Facebook) and in both cases the dominance based models converge significantly faster than the base case.