Dynamic Social Influence Analysis and Opinion Evolution Law Under Certain Influence Network Structures

This paper studies the propagation of social influence and the evolution of opinions for a group of decision makers (DMs) who communicate and collaborate to make decisions. Given the DMs' decision matrices and their social network, a social influence propagation model, which combines the rule of PageRank and the primacy effect phenomenon in psychology to show the evolution of individual's social influence, is proposed. Afterwards, an opinion evolution model considering the dynamic social influence evolution is proposed to model the opinion formation process. Furthermore, we establish the convergence properties of this nonlinear dynamical model for the settings of irreducible and reducible social influence network, where the reducible one is discussed in two scenarios, respectively, the reducible influence network with globally reachable nodes and without globally reachable nodes. With this proposal it is feasible to predict the evolution of individuals' decision information along the discussion process.