The Dynamics of Influence Systems

Abstract: Influence systems form a large class of multiagent systems designed to model how influence, broadly defined, spreads across a dynamic network. We build a general analytical framework which we then use to prove that, while sometimes chaotic, influence dynamics of the diffusive kind is almost always asymptotically periodic. Besides resolving the dynamics of a popular family of multiagent systems, the other contribution of this work is to introduce a new type of renormalization-based bifurcation analysis for multiagent systems.