The Deffuant model on Z with higher-dimensional opinion spaces

Journal article, 2014

When it comes to the mathematical modelling of social interaction patterns, a number of different models have emerged and been studied over the last decade, in which individuals randomly interact on the basis of an underlying graph structure and share their opinions. A prominent example of the so-called bounded confidence models is the one introduced by Deffuant et al.: Two neighboring individuals will only interact if their opinions do not differ by more than a given threshold θ. We consider this model on the line graph Z and extend the results that have been achieved for the model with real-valued opinions by considering vector-valued opinions and general metrics measuring the distance between two opinion values. As in the univariate case there turns out to exist a critical value θ_c for θ at which a phase transition in the long-term behavior takes place, but θ_c depends on the initial distribution in a more intricate way than in the univariate case.