Social Opinion Formation and Decision Making Under Communication Trends

This work studies the learning process over social networks under partial and random information sharing. In traditional social learning models, agents exchange full belief information with each other while trying to infer the true state of nature. We study the case where agents share information about only one hypothesis, namely, the trending topic, which can be randomly changing at every iteration. We show that agents can learn the true hypothesis even if they do not discuss it, at rates comparable to traditional social learning. We also show that using one's own belief as a prior for estimating the neighbors’ non-transmitted beliefs might create opinion clusters that prevent learning with full confidence. This phenomenon occurs when a single hypothesis corresponding to the truth is exchanged exclusively during all times. Such a practice, however, avoids the complete rejection of the truth under any information exchange procedure — something that could happen if priors were uniform.