Measuring satisfaction in societies with opinion leaders and mediators

Abstract

An opinion leader-follower model (OLF) is a two-action collective decision-making model for societies, in which three kinds of actors are considered: "opinion leaders", "followers", and "independent actors". In OLF the initial decision of the followers can be modified by the influence of the leaders. Once the final decision is set, a collective decision is taken applying the simple majority rule. We consider a generalization of \OLF, the gOLF models which allow collective decision taken by rules different from the single majority rule. Inspired in this model we define two new families of collective decision-making models associated with cooperative influence games. We define the "oblivious" and "non-oblivious" influence models. We show that gOLF models are non-oblivious influence models played on a two layered bipartite influence graph. Together with OLF models, the Satisfaction measure was introduced and studied. We analyze the computational complexity of the satisfaction measure for gOLF models and the other collective decision-making models introduced in the paper. We show that computing the satisfaction measure is #P-hard in all the considered models except for the basic OLF inwhich the complexity remains open. On the other hand, we provide two subfamilies of decision models in which the satisfaction measure can be computed in polynomial time. Exploiting the relationship with influence games, we can relate the satisfaction measure with the Rae index of an associated simple game. The Rae index is closely related to the Banzhaf value. Thus, our results also extend the families of simple games for which computing the Rae index and the Banzhaf value is computationally hard.