Modelling the coevolution of opinion dynamics and decision making in social dilemmas

2026-04-10

AI Summary

This study investigates the coevolutionary dynamics of individual cooperative behavior and opinion preferences in social dilemmas. To this end, it introduces a novel asynchronous coevolutionary model that, for the first time, couples Friedkin–Johnsen opinion dynamics with public goods games under myopic best-response strategy updates. The proposed framework unifies the interplay between strategic decision-making and opinion formation, enabling rigorous game-theoretic analysis of equilibrium structure and convergence properties. The main contributions include establishing necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of consensus equilibria—specifically, full cooperation and full defection—and proving that, under certain conditions, the system globally converges to the full defection equilibrium.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Cooperative Game Theory
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Social networks and social learning

Abstract

This paper proposes a mathematical model for the coevolution of actions and opinions for a population facing a social dilemma. In particular, we assume each person participates in a Public Goods Game (PGG), with their action being to cooperate or defect, and holds an opinion about which action they prefer. We propose a payoff function that combines the PGG with the Friedkin--Johnsen model from opinion dynamics to form a coevolutionary game. According to a discrete-time process, players asynchronously update their actions and opinions, aiming to maximise their individual payoff for the coevolutionary game using myopic best-response. We study the equilibria and provide conditions for the existence of the all-defection and all-cooperation consensus equilibria. We also establish conditions for global convergence to the all-defection equilibrium.

Problem

• coevolution
• opinion dynamics
• social dilemmas
• Public Goods Game
• decision making

Innovation

• coevolutionary game
• opinion dynamics
• Public Goods Game
• Friedkin–Johnsen model
• myopic best-response