Opinion Formation by Informed Agents

Opinion formation and innovation diffusion have gained lots of attention in the last decade due to its application in social and political science. Control of the diffusion process usually takes place using the most influential people in the society, called opinion leaders or key players. But the opinion leaders can hardly be accessed or hired for spreading the desired opinion or information. This is where informed agents can play a key role. Informed agents are common people, not distinguishable from the other members of the society that act in coordination. In this paper we show that informed agents are able to gradually shift the public opinion toward a desired goal through microscopic interactions. In order to do so they pretend to have an opinion similar to others, but while interacting with them, gradually and intentionally change their opinion toward the desired direction. In this paper a computational model for opinion formation by the informed agents based on the bounded confidence model is proposed. The effects of different parameter settings including population size of the informed agents, their characteristics, and network structure, are investigated. The results show that social and open-minded informed agents are more efficient than selfish or closed-minded agents in control of the public opinion.