Social influence diffusion and coordinated decision making on networks

Essential properties of a social influence network are a) the mechanism by which social influence is diffused throughout the network and b) the mechanism by which social influence is combined to create emergent interrelationships that enable coordinated decision making. Conditional game theory addresses these issues by a) enabling individuals to invoke conditional preferences to dynamically modulate their preferences in response to the intentions of those who influence them, and b) aggregating the conditional preferences to generate a comprehensive social model that enables agents to coordinate their individual choices. This paper develops an operational definition of coordination and establishes a formal relationship between group level coordination and individual level performance for both acyclical and cyclical social influence networks.