Opinion dynamics in finance and business: a literature review and research opportunities

Opinion dynamics is an opinion evolution process of a group of agents,where the final opinion distribution tends to three stable states:consensus,polarization,and fragmentation.At present,the opinion dynamics models have been extensively studied in differrent fields.This paper provides a review of opinion dynamics in finance and business,such as,finance,marketing,e-commerce,politics,and group decision making.Furthermore,identified research challenges have been proposed to promote the future research of this topic.

Uncertain Opinion Evolution with Bounded Confidence Effects in Social Networks

When people express their opinions for an issue, they can express both exact opinions and uncertain opinions, such as numerical interval opinions. Moreover, social network is a crucial medium of opinion interaction and evolution. In this paper, uncertain opinion evolution with bounded confidence effects in social networks is investigated by theoretical demonstration and numerical examples analyses, and experiments simulations analyses. Theoretical results show when all the agents are with uncertainty tolerances, then the ratios of agents expressing uncertain opinions are impossible to decrease, even increase, as time increases;while when all the agents are without uncertainty tolerances, then the ratios of agents expressing uncertain opinions are impossible to increase, even decrease, as time increases. Moreover, the average widths of uncertain opinions are always smaller than the maximum opinion width of all the initial opinions among agents. Experiments simulations results show different ratios of agents with uncertainty tolerances and different ratios of agents expressing uncertain opinions have strong impact on the ratios of the agents expressing the uncertain opinions in the stable state, and the average widths of uncertain opinions in the stable state.