Diversity-induced resonance in a model for opinion formation
Claudio Juan Tessone and Raul Toral
The European Physical Journal B (2009)
Abstract
We study an opinion formation model that takes into account that individuals have diverse preferences when forming their opinion regarding a particular issue. We show that the system exhibits a phenomenon called \"diversity-induced resonance\"[Tessone et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 194101 (2006)], by which an external influence (for example advertising, or fashion trends) is better followed by populations having the right degree of diversity in their preferences, rather than others where the individuals are identical or have too different preferences. We support our findings by numerical simulations of the model and a mean-field type analytical theory.
