We study continuous opinion formation games with aggregation aspects. In many domains, expressed opinions of people are not only affected by local interaction and personal beliefs, but also by influences that stem from global properties of the opinions in the society. To capture the interplay of such global and local effects, we propose a model of opinion formation games with aggregation, where...

Abstract Americans remain polarized about climate change. However, recent scholarship reveals a plurality of change opinions among the public, with nontrivial support for range awareness, risk perceptions, and policy prescriptions. This study uses publicly available opinion estimates to examine geographic variability American maps them as regions that share similarities or differences in charac...

Empirical studies of public opinion regarding globalization have to date addressed only economic integration. By way of comparison, we know much less about public opinion regarding cultural globalization. In addition, there has been little head-to-head testing of alternative explanations for public opinions in these areas. I contrast four arguments: skills, partisanship, economic evaluations, a...

Existing approaches to knowledge representation and reasoning in the context of open systems either deal with “objective” knowledge or with beliefs. In contrast, there has been almost no research on the formal modelling of opinions, i.e., communicatively asserted ostensible beliefs. This is highly surprising, since opinions are in fact the only publicly visible kind of knowledge in open systems...

In Dempster-Shafer belief theory, general beliefs are expressed as belief mass distribution functions over frames of discernment. In Subjective Logic beliefs are expressed as belief mass distribution functions over binary frames of discernment. Belief representations in Subjective Logic, which are called opinions, also contain a base rate parameter which express the a priori belief in the absen...