title: Fragmentation transitions in multistate voter models.
abstract: Adaptive models of opinion formation among humans can display a fragmentation transition, where a social network breaks into disconnected components. Here we investigate this transition in a class of models with arbitrary number of opinions. In contrast to previous work we do not assume that opinions are equidistant or arranged on a one-dimensional conceptual axis. Our investigation reveals detailed analytical results on fragmentations in a three-opinion model, which are confirmed by agent-based simulations. Furthermore, we show that in certain models the number of opinions can be reduced without affecting the fragmentation points.
authors.affiliation: Max-Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany. gesa@pks.mpg.de
authors.forename: Gesa A
authors.initials: GA
authors.lastname: Böhme
authors.forename: Thilo
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Gross
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D003657:Decision Making; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011639:Public Opinion; D012919:Social Behavior