Majority Dynamics and the Retention of Information

Abstract

We consider a group of agents connected by a social network who participate in majority dynamics: each agent starts with an opinion in {−1, +1} and repeatedly updates it to match the opinion of the majority of its neighbors. We assume that one of {−1, +1} is the "correct" opinion S, and consider a setting in which the initial opinions are independent conditioned on S, and biased towards it. They hence contain enough information to reconstruct S with high probability. We ask whether it is still possible to reconstruct S from the agents' opinions after many rounds of updates. While this is not the case in general, we show that indeed, for a large family of bounded degree graphs, information on S is retained by the process of majority dynamics. Our proof technique yields novel combinatorial results on majority dynamics on both finite and infinite graphs, with applications to zero temperature Ising models.

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