Abstract
Social networks on the Internet have seen an enormous growth recently and play a crucial role in
different aspects of today’s life. They have facilitated information dissemination in ways that have
been beneficial for their users but they are often
used strategically in order to spread information
that only serves the objectives of particular users.
These properties have inspired a revision of classical opinion formation models from sociology using game-theoretic notions and tools. We follow
the same modeling approach, focusing on scenarios where the opinion expressed by each user is
a compromise between her internal belief and the
opinions of a small number of neighbors among her
social acquaintances. We formulate simple games
that capture this behavior and quantify the ineffi-
ciency of equilibria using the well-known notion of
the price of anarchy. Our results indicate that compromise comes at a cost that strongly depends on
the neighborhood size