Noise Leads to Quasi-Consensus of Hegselmann-Krause Opinion Dynamics

This paper aims at providing rigorous theoretical analysis to investigate the consensus behavior of opinion dynamics in noisy environments. It is known that the well-known Hegselmann-Krause (HK) opinion dynamics demonstrates various agreement or disagreement behaviors in the deterministic case. Here we strictly show how noises provide great help to "synchronize" the opinions of the HK model. In fact, we prove a "critical phenomena" of the noisy HK dynamics, that is, the opinions merge as a quasi-consensus in finite time in noisy environment when the noise strength is below a critical value, which implies the fragmentation phenomenon of the HK dynamics could eventually vanish in the presence of noise. On the other hand, the opinions almost surely diverge when the noise strength exceeds the critical value.