Quantifying leadership in climate negotiations: A social power game

We consider complex multistage multiagent negotiation processes such as those occurring at climate conferences and ask ourselves how can an agent maximize its social power, intended as influence over the outcome of the negotiation. This question can be framed as a strategic game played over an opinion dynamics model, in which the action of an agent consists in stubbornly defending its own opinion. We show that for consensus-seeking opinion dynamics models in which the interaction weights are uniform, the optimal action obeys to an early mover advantage principle, i.e. the agents behaving stubbornly in the early phases of the negotiations achieve the highest social power. When looking at data collected from the climate change negotiations going on at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, we find evidence of the use of the early mover strategy. Furthermore, we show that the social powers computed through our model correlate very well with the perceived leadership roles assessed through independent survey data, especially when non-uniform weights incorporating economical and demographic factors are considered.