Opinion Diffusion and Campaigning on Society Graphs

TL;DR

This paper models opinion diffusion and campaigning in society graphs, demonstrating that optimizing campaign strategies can often be computed efficiently despite complex societal partitions and diffusion processes.

Contribution

It introduces a versatile model for campaigning on society graphs and shows that the problem of computing optimal campaigns is generally tractable.

Findings

Computing the cheapest campaign is often efficient even with many voters.

The model can incorporate diverse campaigning actions and societal partitions.

Simulations illustrate the practical aspects of the theoretical results.

Abstract

We study the effects of campaigning, where the society is partitioned into voter clusters and a diffusion process propagates opinions in a network connecting the clusters. Our model is very powerful and can incorporate many campaigning actions, various partitions of the society into clusters, and very general diffusion processes. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that computing the cheapest campaign for rigging a given election can usually be done efficiently, even with arbitrarily-many voters. Moreover, we report on certain computational simulations.