Supervisor

Suitable for

Abstract

We have a set of alternatives A={a, b, c, ...} and a set of voters V; each voter ranks all alternatives in A from his most preferred one to his least preferred one. Voters' opinions may be influenced by the opinions of their friends: this is modeled by placing the voters in the vertices of a directed graph: if there is an edge from u to v, then u influences v. The voters then update their rankings based on their current opinion as well as current opinions of their influencers; the project will consider several update rules (e.g., synchronous vs. asynchronous update, copying a random neighbor vs. copying the majority for a given pair of alternatives, etc.). The goal of the project is to explore the dynamics of this process as a function of the update rule, graph topology and the distribution of the initial opinions. This is intended as an empirical project, but one may also be able to obtain theoretical bounds on the speed of convergence.

Prerequisites: basic programming skills.