Network-Induced Strategic Communication in Opinion Dynamics
Computer Science and Game Theory
Summary
The authors show that how people share their opinions publicly can be understood as a strategic game on a social network where each person tries to both figure out others' opinions and influence them. They find that the network shapes communication through a simple factor that makes people exaggerate. Different communication styles, like sharing exact opinions or using simplified signals, come from different incentives and assumptions about how others interpret messages. Their model explains why people sometimes speak in simple, clear-cut messages instead of nuanced ones, and why opinions tend to cluster without becoming extreme over time.
Authors
Hassan Munif, Anthony Couthures, Vineeth S. Varma, Samson Lasaulce, Tamer Başar
Abstract
Classical opinion dynamics typically assume a fixed mapping from private opinions to public signals, such as linear exchange, saturated signaling, or discrete public actions. In this paper, we show that these communication mappings can be derived from a strategic communication game played on a weighted influence network. Each agent acts as a receiver estimating its neighbors' states and as a sender broadcasting a public signal to influence its audience. We prove that the network's effect on a sender is summarized by a scalar, network-induced exaggeration factor, and the network game decouples into independent scalar cheap talk problems. The communication rules then emerge as behavioral regimes of one model: aligned incentives recover linear averaging; persuasive senders facing naive receivers produce saturated signaling; and persuasive senders facing Bayesian receivers cannot credibly reveal their opinions, so equilibrium communication becomes an interval quantizer, providing a game-theoretic foundation for continuous-opinion discrete-action (CODA) dynamics. Embedded in repeated opinion updates, the resulting strategic-CODA dynamics preserve opinion clustering and exclude extremism. The model predicts that a speaker exaggerates more when their audience is less influenced by them, and that under strong exaggeration, credible public expression collapses to a binary stance even while private opinions remain continuous.