الفهرس 
Effective mechanisms to control opinion formation and diffusion
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Abstract
Opinion Dynamics is the process of recurrently changing and updating a person’s opinion over time under the influence of exogenous factors. The constant mutual influences between the group members possibly lead to a change in the social group structure.Many opinion dynamics models are developed to describe the process of opinion formation and diffusion in a society. Yet, only few models discussedthe effective mechanisms to control and shift opinions to a certain direction. To control opinion dynamics, strategic individuals, called 2Informed Agents3 could be used.The aim of this thesis is to explore and measure the impact of two competing groups of informed agents on opinion dynamics within a society exposed to two extreme poles ofopinion about the topic of concern. Thus, an agent-based model is developed as an extension to the bounded confidence model by assuming the existence of two groups of informed agents.The impact of these agents with respect to their social characteristics, such as, their size in the society, how tolerant they are, their self-weight and attitudes about others{u2019}opinions is explored. Different assumptions about the initial opinion distributions and their effect are also investigated. Due to the difficulty of observing a real society, social simulation experiments are constructed based on artificial societies