Fabrizio Rippa — Università della Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli" #
Hybrid Voter Model #
We investigate how long-range interactions affect consensus formation in a one-dimensional voter model for opinion dynamics. Agents hold binary opinions and update them through a competition between local nearest-neighbor interactions and long-range social links, whose strength decreases with distance. We show that even a small amount of nonlocal interaction can strongly modify the coarsening process, leading to consensus. Depending on how rapidly long-range links decay, the system displays different collective behaviors: a short-range-like regime with a growing crossover scale, a long-range-dominated regime with modified domain growth, and a regime where complete coarsening is suppressed and the system reaches a stationary state. These results show how sparse nonlocal connections can reshape collective decision-making in social and complex systems.