A new preprint came out today from a work I developed together with Alejandro Dinkelberg and Prof. Mike Quayle at UL, Limerick.
Opinion dynamics is a field focused on understanding the evolution of people’s opinions. Within this field, opinions are usually represented as numbers without any other requirement. So we started wondering: can this have some implications on the models?
For example, as we convert meters to feet, we can also convert different scales for measuring people’s opinions. How do these models change when we change their “units?”
From our study, it appears that while physics equations are unaffected by changes of the variable (you just need to rescale) this is not true for opinion dynamics models.
Indeed, we found that scale conversion (even in the case of perfect measurement) can totally change the model’s dynamics. This result in a change on the final outcome up to 100%. Furthermore, by changing scale, we were able to convert one model into another one.
If you are interested in this research, you can find it here:
http://user102493.psee.ly/x4j2e
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 891347.