An agent based positional model for opinion formation in social networks

Opinion leaders are individuals who have high confidence about their opinions and high ability to impact on opinion of other individuals named followers. In this paper we are going to introduce an agent based opinion formation model considering the leadership ability of social members. This ability is defined based on the position of agents in social structure. So each agent has a social status considering leadership ability. In our proposed model opinion of each agent can be modified based on the opinion of agents with higher status. By applying this model on two complete and scale free graphs, we have investigated the effect of opinion leader in opinion formation process. The results of our work can be applicable in competitive environments that different parties try to change the social opinion.