Influencing Opinions of Heterogeneous Populations over Finite Time Horizons

• Published in: 2021 International Conference on COMmunication Systems & NETworkS (COMSNETS) pp. 474 - 482
• Main Authors: Saxena, Arunabh, Kumar, Bhumesh, Gupta, Anmol, Sahasrabudhe, Neeraja, Moharir, Sharayu
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 05-01-2021
• Subjects: Advertising; Social networking (online); Sociology; Statistics; Voting
• ISSN: 2155-2509
• DOI: 10.1109/COMSNETS51098.2021.9352905

We propose a variant of the popular voter model. This variant models different types of individuals in a social network, for e.g., conformist/rebel individuals. In addition, our model allow individuals to change their "type" with time. Motivated by prevalence of online social networks, we consider a well-connected society where all individuals in society can communicate with each other. Moreover, we allow external influence to influence the opinion of individuals. The motivation of this work comes from advertising where it is key to use the limited advertising budget efficiently for opinion shaping. We focus on a finite-time horizon problem and analyse the effect of the nature of individuals on the nature of optimal opinion-shaping strategies. In one of the key results in this work, we show that the conventional wisdom of ramping up advertising towards the end of the time-horizon, as is typically done in election campaigns, is not always optimal.