Social Power Games for Parallel Friedkin-Johnsen Models

Journal Article (2026)
Author(s)

Lingfei Wang (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)

Yu Xing (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)

Shijie Huang (TU Delft - Mechanical Engineering)

Claudio Altafini (Linköping University)

Karl Henrik Johansson (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)

Research Group
Team Sergio Grammatico
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.1109/TAC.2025.3631717 Final published version
More Info
expand_more
Publication Year
2026
Language
English
Research Group
Team Sergio Grammatico
Journal title
IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control
Issue number
5
Volume number
71
Pages (from-to)
3074-3089
Downloads counter
12
Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Abstract

In this paper we consider a strategic game played by a group of agents on a set of opinion dynamics models. The models are all Friedkin-Johnsen (FJ) models, which are independent of each other (we call them “parallel FJ models”). The task of an agent is to maximize her overall social power by allocating a given budget of stubbornness across the parallel FJ models. For this game, the cost function is shown to be convex in the action profile set, but discontinuous at some boundary points when for some FJ model only one agent is stubborn (i.e., assigning non-zero stubbornness in the FJ model). Despite the discontinuity, an Nash equilibrium is shown to exist, but is not necessarily unique. Some sufficient conditions that can guarantee the uniqueness are proposed, relying on the strictly monotone pseudo-gradient mappings associated to the game. The conditions are applied to complete graphs with rank-1 weight matrices, for which the link weights are unequal for different agents and on different FJ models. Moreover, for the complete graph case, given the actions of the other agents, the best response of each agent is analytically characterized.

Files

Social_Power_Games_for_Paralle... (pdf)
(pdf | 0.938 Mb)
- Embargo expired in 11-05-2026
Taverne