Granular DeGroot Dynamics - a Model for Robust Naive Learning in Social Networks.

Gideon Amir, Itai Arieli, Galit Ashkenazi-Golan, Ron Peretz

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

Abstract

We study a model of opinion exchange in social networks where a state of the world is realized and every agent receives a zero-mean noisy signal of the realized state. It is known from Golub and Jackson [6] that under DeGroot [3] dynamics agents reach a consensus that is close to the state of the world when the network is large. The DeGroot dynamics, however, is highly non-robust and the presence of a single "stubborn agent" that does not adhere to the updating rule can sway the public consensus to any other value. We introduce a variant of DeGroot dynamics that we call 1/m-DeGroot. 1/m-DeGroot dynamics approximates standard DeGroot dynamics to the nearest rational number with m as its denominator and like the DeGroot dynamics it is Markovian and stationary. We show that in contrast to standard DeGroot dynamics, 1/m-DeGroot dynamics is highly robust both to the presence of stubborn agents and to certain types of misspecifications.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEC '22: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Pages323-324
ISBN (Print)978-1-4503-9150-4
DOIs
StatePublished - 13 Jul 2022

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