What makes an opinion leader: expertise vs popularity (Q2685846)

This paper studies the ways expertise and popularity make an opinion leader. It proposes a model to analytically track down and decompose the source of agents' social influence into two components. Namely, a position-driven popularity and an information-driven expertise. The decomposition carries first-order policy implications and agents can change the trust they assign to their peers' opinions based on the accuracy of the new information each peer is believed to have acquired. The paper shows that agents with low-quality initial information can still contribute to the learning process and affect society's beliefs. This is because the updating process used in the framework allows for the weights to change over time.