Opinion formation

This study examines whether internal control quality is associated with auditors’ going concern assessments following the implementation of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). Based on a sample of financially distressed firms that issued internal control reports under SOX Section 404 in 2004 and 2005, we find that firms with material internal control weaknesses are more likely to receive going concern audit opinions. Further analysis indicates that the positive association between disclosures of material weaknesses and auditors’ propensity to issue a going concern opinions is largely driven by a subset of firms that disclose company-level material weaknesses, suggesting that only the more severe type of internal control material weakness influences the going concern assessment. These findings add to our understanding of the audit opinion formation process and the potentially important impact of internal control quality on that process.

Social media have become central to the organizational and logistic dynamics in contemporary social contention. Not only have they eased centralized processes of information sharing between social movement entrepreneurs and social movement publics, they have also bolstered the crowdsourced management of public discussion around social contention. This article investigates the use of social media for public reasoning around issues related to social contention. By investigating Twitter streams with reference to the Italian chapter of the 15 October 2011 polycentric protest for global change, this study specifically addresses the use of this medium in the aftermath of protest events of high impact for the general public. The quantitative analysis of longitudinal progression, networking mechanisms and processes of meaning construction in over 8000 tweets shows that Twitter does bolster public reasoning around social contention. It does so as a news medium rather than a conversational platform, primarily providing a space to share information alternative to that available in mainstream media coverage.

In 2000 we proposed a sociophysics model of opinion formation, which was based on trade union maxim "United we Stand, Divided we Fall" (USDF) and latter due to Dietrich Stauffer became known as the Sznajd model (SM). The main difference between SM compared to voter or Ising-type models is that information flows outward. In this paper we review the modifications and applications of SM that have been proposed in the literature.

This paper examines the interplay of opinion exchange dynamics and communication network formation. An opinion formation procedure is introduced which is based on an abstract representation of opinions as $k$--dimensional bit--strings. Individuals interact if the difference in the opinion strings is below a defined similarity threshold $d_I$. Depending on $d_I$, different behaviour of the population is observed: low values result

With hundreds of millions of users worldwide, social networks provide incredible opportunities for social connection, learning, political and social change, and individual entertainment and enhancement in a wide variety of forms. In light of these notable outcomes, understanding information diffusion over online social networks is a critical research goal. Because many social interactions currently take place in online networks, we now have have access to unprecedented amounts of information about social interaction. Prior to the advent of such online networks, investigations about social behavior required resource-intensive activities such as random trials, surveys, and manual data collection to gather even small data sets. Now, massive amounts of information about social networks and social interactions are recorded. This wealth of data can allow us to study social interactions on a scale and at a level of detail that has never before been possible. We present an integrated approach to information diffusion in online social networks focusing on three key problems: (1) Querying and analysis of online social network datasets; (2) Modeling and analysis of social networks; and (3) Analysis of social media and social interactions in the contemporary media environment. The overarching goals are to generate a greater understanding of social interactions in online networks through data analysis, to develop reliable and scalable models that can predict outcomes of these social processes, and ultimately to create applications that can shape the outcome of these processes. We start by developing and refining models of information diffusion based on real-world data sets. We next address the problem of finding influential users in this data-driven framework. It is equally important to identify techniques that can slow or prevent the spread of misinformation, and hence algorithms are explored to address this question. A third interest is the process by which a social group forms opinions about an idea or product, and we therefore describe preliminary approaches to create models that accurately capture the opinion formation process in online social networks. While questions relating to the propagation of a single news item or idea are important, these information campaigns do not exist in isolation. Therefore, our proposed approach also addresses the interplay of the many information diffusion processes that take place simultaneously in a network and the relative importance of different topics or trends over multiple spatial and temporal resolutions.

The human opinion formation can be understood as a social approach to optimization. In the real world, the opinions encode a candidate solution, which is evaluated by a complex and unknown fitness function. The computer models of such processes can be slightly modified by introducing a fitness value, which leads to novel family of optimization techniques. This paper demonstrates how the novel algorithms can be derived from opinion formation models and empirically proves their usability in the area of binary optimization. Particularly, it introduces a general SITO algorithmic framework and describes three algorithms based on this general framework - the previously proposed original distance-based (oSITO), the simplified (sSITO) and the Galam inspired (gSITO) algorithm.

We here propose a model to simulate the process of opinion formation, which accounts for the mutual affinity between interacting agents. Opinion and affinity evolve self-consistently, manifesting a highly non trivial interplay. A continuous transition is found between single and multiple opinion states. Fractal dimension and signature of critical behaviour are also reported. A rich phenomenology is presented and discussed with reference to corresponding psychological implications.

We study a cellular automaton opinion formation model of Ising type, with antiferromagnetic pair interactions modeling anticonformism, and ferromagnetic plaquette terms modeling the social norm constraints. For a sufficiently large connectivity, the mean-field equation for the average magnetization (opinion density) is chaotic. This "chaoticity" would imply irregular coherent oscillations of the whole society, that may eventually lead to a sudden

This article considers how changing media practices of minority groups and political and media elites impact on democratic participation in national debates. Taking as its case study the state-sponsored campaign to formally recognise Indigenous people in the Australian constitution, the article examines the interrelationships between political media and Indigenous participatory media—both of which we argue are undergoing seismic transformation. Discussion of constitutional reform has tended to focus on debates occurring in forums of influence such as party politics and news media that privilege the voices of only a few high-profile Indigenous media ‘stars’. Debate has progressed on the assumption that constitutional change needs to be settled by political elites and then explained and ‘sold’ to Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Our research on the mediatisation of policymaking has found that in an increasingly media-saturated environment, political leaders and their policy ...

Nach den US-amerikanischen Erfolgen, das World Wide Web für Wahlkampfzwecke zu nutzen, suchen auch deutsche Politiker und Politologen nach den richtigen Werkzeugen, um dieses Medium in Deutschland sinnvoll zu verwenden. Ein Teilbereich politischer Kommunikation, welcher sich durch das WWW unterstützen lässt, ist die politische Meinungsfindung. Im Rahmen des Neuorientierungsprozesses einer deutschen Partei wurden Elemente des so genannten Web 2.0 genutzt, um Meinungen zu bündeln und zu bewerten. Dieser Beitrag stellt - ergänzend zur Bewertung der Unterstützung dieses speziellen politischen Prozesses - die verwendeten Technologien vor und gibt Empfehlungen für zukünftige Projekte dieser Art.

We here discuss the process of opinion formation in an open community where agents are made to interact and consequently update their beliefs. New actors (birth) are assumed to replace individuals that abandon the community (deaths). This dynamics is simulated in the framework of a simplified model that accounts for mutual affinity between agents. A rich phenomenology is presented and discussed with reference to the original (closed group) setting. Numerical findings are supported by analytical calculations.

We here discuss the process of opinion formation in an open community where agents are made to interact and consequently update their beliefs. New actors (birth) are assumed to replace individuals that abandon the community (deaths). This dynamics is simulated in the framework of a simplified model that accounts for mutual affinity between agents. A rich phenomenology is presented and discussed with reference to the original (closed group) setting. Numerical findings are supported by analytical calculations.

Opinion formation and innovation diffusion have gained lots of attention in the last decade due to its application in social and political science. Control of the diffusion process usually takes place using the most influential people in the society, called opinion leaders or key players. But the opinion leaders can hardly be accessed or hired for spreading the desired opinion

The homogeneous isotropic Boltzmann equation (HIBE) is a fundamental dynamic model for many applications in thermodynamics, econophysics and sociodynamics. Despite recent hardware improvements, the solution of the Boltzmann equation remains extremely challenging from the computational point of view, in particular by deterministic methods (free of stochastic noise). This work aims to improve a deterministic direct method recently proposed [V.V. Aristov, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001] for solving the HIBE with a generic collisional kernel and, in particular, for taking care of the late dynamics of the relaxation towards the equilibrium. Essentially (a) the original problem is reformulated in terms of particle kinetic energy (exact particle number and energy conservation during microscopic collisions) and (b) the computation of the relaxation rates is improved by the DVM-like correction, where DVM stands for Discrete Velocity Model (ensuring that the macroscopic conservation laws ar...

Social media have become central to the organizational and logistic dynamics in contemporary social contention. Not only have they eased centralized processes of information sharing between social movement entrepreneurs and social movement publics, they have also bolstered the crowdsourced management of public discussion around social contention. This article investigates the use of social media for public reasoning around issues related to social contention. By investigating Twitter streams with reference to the Italian chapter of the 15 October 2011 polycentric protest for global change, this study specifically addresses the use of this medium in the aftermath of protest events of high impact for the general public. The quantitative analysis of longitudinal progression, networking mechanisms and processes of meaning construction in over 8000 tweets shows that Twitter does bolster public reasoning around social contention. It does so as a news medium rather than a conversational pl...

Weighted scale-free networks with topology-dependent interactions are studied. It is shown that the possible universality classes of critical behaviour, which are known to depend on topology, can also be explored by tuning the form of the interactions at fixed topology. For a model of opinion formation, simple mean field and scaling arguments show that a mapping $\gamma'=(\gamma-\mu)/(1-\mu)$ describes how a shift of the standard exponent $\gamma$ of the degree distribution can absorb the effect of degree-dependent pair interactions $J_{ij} \propto (k_ik_j)^{-\mu}$, where $k_i$ stands for the degree of vertex $i$. This prediction is verified by extensive numerical investigations using the cavity method and Monte Carlo simulations. The critical temperature of the model is obtained through the Bethe-Peierls approximation and with the replica technique. The mapping can be extended to nonequilibrium models such as those describing the spreading of a disease on a network.