An evolutionary game theory model of binary opinion formation

A basic characteristic of most opinion models is that people tend to agree or compromise in the opinion interaction, which could be hopefully described by cooperative games in the evolutionary game theory framework. This paper presents game theory methods to model the formation of binary opinions: cooperative games are proposed to model the interaction rules of general people who tend to find an agreement; minority games are proposed to model the behaviors of contrarians; opinion preference is considered by varying the payoff values. The Majority Voter model could be restored from the proposed games. The game theory models show evolutionary results similar to traditional opinion models. Specially, the evolution of opinions with consideration of contrarians is in accordance with the Galam model. Furthermore, influences of evolving rule, network topology and initial distribution of opinions are studied through numerical simulations. Discussions about methods to promote or hinder the consensus state at the best equilibrium point are given.