Percolation Threshold for Competitive Influence in Random Networks

In this article, we propose a new averaging model for modeling the competitive influence of K candidates among n voters in an election process. For such an influence propagation model, we address the question of how many seeded voters that a candidate needs to place among undecided voters in order to win an election. We show that for a random network generated from the stochastic block model (SBM), there exists a percolation threshold for a candidate to win the election if the number of seeded voters placed by the candidate exceeds the threshold. By conducting extensive experiments, we show that our theoretical percolation thresholds are very close to those obtained from simulations for random networks, and the errors are within 10% for a real-world network.