Fluctuation versus fixation in the one-dimensional constrained voter model

Nicolas Lanchier, Stylianos Scarlatos

Published 2013-10-01Version 1

The constrained voter model describes the dynamics of opinions in a population of individuals located on a connected graph. Each agent is characterized by her opinion, where the set of opinions is represented by a finite sequence of consecutive integers, and each pair of neighbors, as defined by the edge set of the graph, interact at a constant rate. The dynamics depends on two parameters: the number of opinions denoted by $F$ and a so-called confidence threshold denoted by $\theta$. If the opinion distance between two interacting agents exceeds the confidence threshold then nothing happens, otherwise one of the two agents mimics the other one just as in the classical voter model. Our main result shows that the one-dimensional system starting from any product measures with a positive density of each opinion fluctuates and clusters if and only if $F \leq 2 \theta + 1$. Sufficient conditions for fixation in one dimension when the initial distribution is uniform and lower bounds for the probability of consensus for the process on finite connected graphs are also proved.