Optimizing Social Consensus: The Impact of Agent Selection and Topic Strategy on Time to Reach Agreement

Johannes Vorster, Louise Leenen, Louise Leenen

2025

Abstract

In the rapidly evolving landscape of organizational structures and project management, achieving timely consensus among team members is crucial for maintaining agility and responsiveness. During the consensus formation process, team members has the choice of who to talk to in an attempt to consolidate views on a topic. In this paper we ask the question, to what extent do strategies for selecting team members affect the speed of consensus formation? Similarly, once two team members engage in conversations on a specific set of topics, the question we ask is, to what extent do different strategies for selecting the topics for discussion affect the time to reach consensus within multi-agent systems. By simulating various strategies, we identify methods that optimize consensus speed, specifically highlighting the benefits of prioritizing unaligned agents and addressing contentious topics early in the process. Our findings reveal that these strategies significantly enhance consensus efficiency, while approaches focusing on aligning with similar views tend to prolong the process. Additionally, we observe that the initial distribution of agent views, provided the standard deviation is constant, has negligible effects on consensus time, suggesting that diversity of opinion is more critical than specific distribution patterns. These insights offer practical implications for improving decision-making processes in organizational and project contexts.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Vorster J. and Leenen L. (2025). Optimizing Social Consensus: The Impact of Agent Selection and Topic Strategy on Time to Reach Agreement. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Simulation and Modeling Methodologies, Technologies and Applications - Volume 1: SIMULTECH; ISBN 978-989-758-759-7, SciTePress, pages 135-144. DOI: 10.5220/0013650900003970

in Bibtex Style

@conference{simultech25,
author={Johannes Vorster and Louise Leenen},
title={Optimizing Social Consensus: The Impact of Agent Selection and Topic Strategy on Time to Reach Agreement},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Simulation and Modeling Methodologies, Technologies and Applications - Volume 1: SIMULTECH},
year={2025},
pages={135-144},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013650900003970},
isbn={978-989-758-759-7},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Simulation and Modeling Methodologies, Technologies and Applications - Volume 1: SIMULTECH
TI - Optimizing Social Consensus: The Impact of Agent Selection and Topic Strategy on Time to Reach Agreement
SN - 978-989-758-759-7
AU - Vorster J.
AU - Leenen L.
PY - 2025
SP - 135
EP - 144
DO - 10.5220/0013650900003970
PB - SciTePress