  The focus of this work is on designing influencing strategies to shape the
collective opinion of a network of individuals. We consider a variant of the
voter model where opinions evolve in one of two ways. In the absence of
external influence, opinions evolve via interactions between individuals in the
network, while, in the presence of external influence, opinions shift in the
direction preferred by the influencer. We focus on a finite time-horizon and an
influencing strategy is characterized by when it exerts influence in this
time-horizon given its budget constraints. Prior work on this opinion dynamics
model assumes that individuals take into account the opinion of all individuals
in the network. We generalize this and consider the setting where the opinion
evolution of an individual depends on a limited collection of opinions from the
network. We characterize the nature of optimal influencing strategies as a
function of the way in which this collection of opinions is formed.
