Jumping on the Bandwagon: Group Opinion Prompts Agents to Reach Consensus

Since the Hegselmann-Krause model was proposed, many scholars have done a lot of research and improvement on it, but the influence based on bandwagon effect has not been considered before. In this paper, based on bandwagon effect, considering the factors of group opinion and trust degree, we propose a novel bandwagon effect-based Hegselmann–Krause model. In our work, we formulate rules of how the opinions of opinion leaders and normal agents change, and conduct simulation experiments on both artificially generated and real network datasets. Extensive experiments show that under the joint influence of group opinion and opinion leaders, no matter how the proportion of opinion leaders and threshold of difference of opinions change, and how the network scale is, except stubborn agents and isolated agents, the opinions of other agents can reach consensus in a short time, which can explain the conformity phenomenon.