A voter model with aging

The dynamics of adoption of different features such as innovations, opinions, or ideas is a topic that has attracted the attention of researchers from disciplines as diverse as Economics, Sociology, and Physics. The complex composition of modern societies makes possible nowadays the coexistence of conservative groups, where traditional ideas tend to be hold in an unaltered form for a long time, with groups of people more open to assimilate faster new innovations. This fact, however, has not been translated yet into the diverse variety of opinion models. In this work we consider a model that takes into account the time the individual has hold the feature. Specifically, we address the question of how does the time passed since an individual has adopted a feature (opinion, idea, or innovation) influences its spreading. Among other results, we were able to determine analytically the time needed for a new created feature to be adopted by the system. When confronting an opinion with other opinion shared by the rest of the group, we find that older opinions need an ordering time that scales exponentially with system size, while for younger opinions the adoption is much faster scaling as the logarithm of the system size.