Title: Opinion formation in a locally interacting community with recommender,
Abstract: We present a user of model interaction based on the physics of kinetic
exchange, and extend it to individuals placed in a grid with local interaction.
We show with numerical analysis and partial analytical results that the
critical symmetry breaking transitions and percolation effects typical of the
full interaction model do not take place if the range of interaction is
limited, allowing for the co-existence of majorty and minority opinions in the
same community.
We then introduce a peer recommender system in the model, showing that, even
with very local iteraction and a small probability of appeal to the
recommender, its presence is sufficient to make both symmetry breaking and
percolation reappear. This seems to indicate that one effect of a
recommendation system is to uniform the opinions of a community, reducing
minority opinions or making them disappear. Although the recommender system
does uniform the community opinion, it doesn't constrain it, in the sense that
all opinions have the same probability of becoming the dominating one. We do a
partial study, however, that suggests that a "mischievous" recommender might be
able to bias a community so that one opinion will emerge over the opposite with
overwhelming probability.