Economics research seminar: Wei Li, The University of British Columbia
Research topic: Dynamic Network Influence: The Art of Strategic Messaging
Presenter
Wei Li, The University of British Columbia
Topic
Dynamic Network Influence: The Art of Strategic Messaging
abstract
Strategic influencers send costly messages over time to persuade agents in a network. Each influencer maximizes her total discounted payoff, which decreases in the agents' opinion deviations from her agenda. Agents update opinions by taking weighted averages of neighbors' opinions and influencers' messages. In a single influencer benchmark, early messages are more extreme to hasten agenda adoption, followed by moderate messages to align opinions with her agenda. The influencer is worse off in networks where the weights agents attach to their own opinions are farther apart from the weights agents attach to their neighbors' opinions. With multiple influencers, if they have the same impact on agents, consensus emerges in any network as the average agenda of the influencers. If they have different impacts, in symmetric networks, consensus still emerges but it favors the agenda of the stronger influencer. In asymmetric networks, influencers with different impacts often target different subgroups with differing intensity, generating perpetual disagreement and polarization.
