Bounded confidence with rejection: clusters or scattered opinions ?
Confiance bornée avec rejet: organisation en groupe d'opinion ou changement permanent d'opinion
Résumé
Huet and Deffuant (2007) propose a new opinion dynamics model based on the bounded confidence principles, with a rejection mechanism. We study new simulations of the agent-based model for a population of 10000 individuals. We generally observe fewer clusters than the classical bounded confidence model, and below a threshold of the uncertainty, no cluster appear: all opinions remain scattered. We build an aggregated model of this agent-based model (ABM), in the limit case of an infinite population, in order to better understand this dynamical behaviour. When adding a small perturbation in the initial distribution, the aggregated model and ABM yield similar numbers of clusters for the same parameters. Below a critical value of uncertainty, the aggregated model forms no cluster and the distribution remains uniform. The critical value is higher for the aggregated model than for the ABM, indicating a finite size effect that we discuss.