Optimal Opinion Control: The Campaign Problem

TL;DR

This paper introduces a strategic opinion control model where a single agent influences normal agents' opinions over time, framing it as an optimal control problem and exploring its computational challenges and ethical implications.

Contribution

It formulates a novel strategic opinion control problem as an optimal control challenge and applies advanced methods to solve small instances, highlighting its complexity and ethical concerns.

Findings

Optimal control methods can be applied to opinion dynamics.

Even small instances of the problem are computationally difficult.

Ethical issues arise from strategic opinion manipulation.

Abstract

Opinion dynamics is nowadays a very common field of research. In this article we formulate and then study a novel, namely strategic perspective on such dynamics: There are the usual normal agents that update their opinions, for instance according the well-known bounded confidence mechanism. But, additionally, there is at least one strategic agent. That agent uses opinions as freely selectable strategies to get control on the dynamics: The strategic agent of our benchmark problem tries, during a campaign of a certain length, to influence the ongoing dynamics among normal agents with strategically placed opinions (one per period) in such a way, that, by the end of the campaign, as much as possible normals end up with opinions in a certain interval of the opinion space. Structurally, such a problem is an optimal control problem. That type of problem is ubiquitous. Resorting to advanced and partly non-standard methods for computing optimal controls, we solve some instances of the campaign problem. But even for a very small number of normal agents, just one strategic agent, and a ten-period campaign length, the problem turns out to be extremely difficult. Explicitly we discuss moral and political concerns that immediately arise, if someone starts to analyze the possibilities of an optimal opinion control.