Study finds early stubbornness wins in group opinion battles
Researchers modeling strategic opinion-shaping found that agents who commit to fixed positions early in group discussions gain outsized influence over outcomes. The finding suggests negotiators and organizations pushing agendas should entrench positions upfront—a pattern that could reshape how companies approach board meetings, stakeholder negotiations, and regulatory proceedings.
Originaltitel: Social Power Games in Concatenated Opinion Dynamics
<p>In this article, we propose and solve a social power game, i.e., a strategic game formulated on an opinion dynamics model and in which the agents aim to maximize their social power. As model we consider the concatenated Friedkin-Johnsen (FJ) model, which describes opinion evolution over a sequence of discussion events, while as actions we take the stubbornness coefficients, which can be freely chosen by the agents in order to maximize their social power, here corresponding to the utility function of the game. We show that the optimal solution of the social power game corresponds to an "early mover" strategy, in the sense that being stubborn as much as possible in early meetings allows to achieve the highest social power. This early mover advantage can be explained in terms of a diminishing return law that exists in the concatenated FJ model.</p>