期刊名称：Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation
印刷版ISSN：1460-7425
出版年度：2015
卷号：18
期号：3
页码：1-1
DOI：10.18564/jasss.2847
出版社：University of Surrey, Department of Sociology
摘要：Opinion dynamics is nowadays a very common field of research. In this article we formulate and then study a novel, namely strategic perspective on such dynamics: There are the usual 'normal' agents that update their opinions, for instance according the well-known bounded confidence mechanism. But, additionally, there is at least one strategic agent. That agent uses opinions as freely selectable strategies to get control on the dynamics: The strategic agent of our benchmark problem tries, during a campaign of a certain length, to influence the ongoing dynamics among normal agents with strategically placed opinions (one per period) in such a way, that, by the end of the campaign, as much as possible normals end up with opinions in a certain interval of the opinion space. Structurally, such a problem is an optimal control problem. That type of problem is ubiquitous. Resorting to advanced and partly non-standard methods for computing optimal controls, we solve some instances of the campaign problem. But even for a very small number of normal agents, just one strategic agent, and a ten-period campaign length, the problem turns out to be extremely difficult. Explicitly we discuss moral and political concerns that immediately arise, if someone starts to analyze the possibilities of an optimal opinion control.
