Coevolutionary Opinion Formation Games

We present game-theoretic models of opinion formation in social networks where opinions themselves co-evolve with friendships. In these models, nodes form their opinions by maximizing agreements with friends weighted by the strength of the relationships, which in turn depend on difference in opinion with the respective friends. We define a social cost of this process by generalizing recent work of Bindel et al., FOCS 2011. We tightly bound the price of anarchy of the resulting dynamics via local smoothness arguments, and characterize it as a function of how much nodes value their own (intrinsic) opinion, as well as how strongly they weigh links to friends with whom they agree more.