On the Consensus Threshold for the Opinion Dynamics of Krause-Hegselmann

Abstract

In the consensus model of Krause-Hegselmann, opinions are real numbers between 0 and 1 and two agents are compatible if the difference of their opinions is smaller than the confidence bound parameter ε. A randomly chosen agent takes the average of the opinions of all neighbouring agents which are compatible with it. We propose a conjecture, based on numerical evidence, on the value of the consensus threshold ε_c of this model. We claim that ε_c can take only two possible values, depending on the behaviour of the average degree d of the graph representing the social relationships, when the population N goes to infinity: if d diverges when N goes to infinity, ε_c equals the consensus threshold ε_i ~ 0.2 on the complete graph; if instead d stays finite when N goes to infinity, ε_c=1/2 as for the model of Deffuant et al.

15 pages, 7 figures, to appear in International Journal of Modern Physics C 16, issue 2 (2005)