Opinion Diffusion and Campaigning on Society Graphs

Abstract

We study the effects of campaigning, where the society is partitioned into voter clusters and a diffusion process propagates opinions in a network connecting those clusters. Our model is very general and can incorporate many campaigning actions, various partitions of the society into voter clusters, and very general diffusion processes. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that computing the cheapest campaign for rigging a given election can usually be done efficiently, even with arbitrarily-many voters.