Abstract. We introduce the vacillating voter model in which each voter consults two neighbors to decide its state, and changes opinion if it disagrees with either neighbor. This irresolution leads to a global bias toward zero magnetization. In spatial dimension d>1, anti-coarsening arises in which the linear dimension L of minority domains grows as t^1/(d+1). One consequence is that the time to reach consensus scales exponentially with the number of voters.

Key words: coarsening processes (theory); critical phenomena of socio-economic systems; scaling in socio-economic systems; probability theory

E-print number: 0710.0914
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Received 5 October 2007, accepted for publication 8 October 2007
Published 23 October 2007