On the Impact of Social Cost in Opinion Dynamics

Abstract

We study the formation of opinions in a social context. It has been observed that when in a social environment people often average their opinion with their friends' opinions, so as to highlight their common beliefs. We analyze a popular social network and verify that social interaction indeed results in influence on opinions among the participants. Moreover we create instances of the network using real data and, based on the game theory framework, we experimentally show that the repeated averaging process results to Nash equilibria which are illustrative of how users really behave.