The Impact of Structural Position on Opinion Leadership in Social Network

Opinion leaders are individuals who have specific personal features that enable them to impact opinions of other agents named followers. In this paper we are going to introduce an agent based opinion formation model to investigate the impact of structural position of agents on their ability to navigate the opinion of social network. For each agent, this ability is defined based on the judgment of his neighbors about his status. The status of each agent is estimated based on status theory. In proposed model, we suppose each agent can modify the opinion of his neighbors with lower status. By applying this model on two complete and scale free graphs, we have investigated the effect of agents’ position on opinion leadership ability. Also the effect of leaders to navigate the opinion of agents is studied. The results of our work can be applicable in competitive environments that different parties try to change the social opinion.

Keywords:

opinion formation , social network , leader , follower , agent