The Role of Frustration in Collective Decision-Making Dynamical Processes on Multiagent Signed Networks

In this article, we consider a collective decision-making process in a network of agents described by a nonlinear interconnected dynamical model with sigmoidal nonlinearities and signed interaction graph. The decisions are encoded in the equilibria of the system. The aim is to investigate this multiagent system when the signed graph representing the community is not structurally balanced and in particular as we vary its frustration, i.e., its distance to structural balance. The model exhibits bifurcations, and a “social effort” parameter, added to the model to represent the strength of the interactions between the agents, plays the role of bifurcation parameter in our analysis. We show that, as the social effort increases, the decision-making dynamics exhibit a pitchfork bifurcation behavior where, from a deadlock situation of “no decision” (i.e., the origin is the only globally stable equilibrium point), two possible (alternative) decision states for the community are achieved (corresponding to two nonzero locally stable equilibria). The value of social effort for which the bifurcation is crossed (and a decision is reached) increases with the frustration of the signed network.