Mixed Hegselmann-Krause Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mixed Hegselmann-Krause model where agents have varying degrees of stubbornness, analyzing how this affects convergence and consensus in opinion dynamics.

Contribution

It extends the HK model by incorporating agents with different stubbornness levels and studies the resulting impact on stability and consensus.

Findings

Finite-time convergence does not hold in the mixed model.

Conditions for asymptotic stability are identified.

Consensus can be achieved under certain conditions.

Abstract

The original Hegselmann-Krause (HK) model consists of a set of~$n$ agents that are characterized by their opinion, a number in~$[0, 1]$. Each agent, say agent~$i$, updates its opinion~$x_i$ by taking the average opinion of all its neighbors, the agents whose opinion differs from~$x_i$ by at most~$\epsilon$. There are two types of~HK models: the synchronous~HK model and the asynchronous~HK model. For the synchronous model, all the agents update their opinion simultaneously at each time step, whereas for the asynchronous~HK model, only one agent chosen uniformly at random updates its opinion at each time step. This paper is concerned with a variant of the~HK opinion dynamics, called the mixed~HK model, where each agent can choose its degree of stubbornness and mix its opinion with the average opinion of its neighbors at each update. The degree of the stubbornness of agents can be different and/or vary over time. An agent is not stubborn or absolutely open-minded if its new opinion at each update is the average opinion of its neighbors, and absolutely stubborn if its opinion does not change at the time of the update. The particular case where, at each time step, all the agents are absolutely open-minded is the synchronous~HK model. In contrast, the asynchronous model corresponds to the particular case where, at each time step, all the agents are absolutely stubborn except for one agent chosen uniformly at random who is absolutely open-minded. We first show that some of the common properties of the synchronous~HK model, such as finite-time convergence, do not hold for the mixed model. We then investigate conditions under which the asymptotic stability holds, or a consensus can be achieved for the mixed model.