Quantifying the Effect of Open-Mindedness on Opinion Dynamics and Advertising Optimization

Group opinion dynamics shape our world in innumerable ways. Societal aspects ranging from the political parties we support to the economic decisions we make in our daily lives are all directly af- fected in some way by group opinion dynamics. This makes understanding and potentially being able to predict the complex inter-relationships between individuals’ opinions and group opinion dynam- ics invaluable both scientifically and economically. We propose an aggregation model incorporating ingroup-outgroup dynamics, as well as media influence, to establish potential causal relationships between various types of social interaction and social phenomena such as the occurrence of group consensus and the hostile media effect. We further apply our model to simplified commercial appli- cations relating to advertisement optimization to determine the optimal proportion of a population to target with advertising in order to maximize opinion shift while fixing cost.