---
title: "Opinion Dynamics with Local Interactions"
authors:
  - "Dimitris Fotakis"
  - "Dimitris Palyvos-Giannas"
  - "Stratis Skoulakis"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2016/47"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2016/0047.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2016
pages: "279-284"
track: ""
keywords:
---

# Opinion Dynamics with Local Interactions

Dimitris Fotakis, Dimitris Palyvos-Giannas, Stratis Skoulakis

*Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 279-284.

## Abstract

We study convergence properties of opinion dynamics with local interactions and limited information exchange. We adopt a general model where the agents update their opinions in rounds to a weighted average of the opinions in their neighborhoods. For fixed neighborhoods, we present a simple randomized protocol that converges in expectation to the stable state of the Friedkin-Johnsen model. For opinion-dependent neighborhoods, we show that the Hegselmann-Krause model converges to a stable state if each agent's neighborhood is restricted either to a subset of her acquaintances or to a small random subset of agents. Our experimental findings indicate that for a wide range of parameters, the convergence time and the number of opinion clusters of the neighborhood-restricted variants are comparable to those of the standard Hegselmann-Krause model.