Control of the socio-economic systems using herding interactions

•We introduce a fixed number of controlled agents into the agent-based herding model.•The impact of the controlled agents depends only on their number.•The proposed model may be considered as an explanation of the leadership phenomenon.

Collective behavior of the complex socio-economic systems is heavily influenced by the herding, group, behavior of individuals. The importance of the herding behavior may enable the control of the collective behavior of the individuals. In this contribution we consider a simple agent-based herding model modified to include agents with controlled state. We show that in certain case even the smallest fixed number of the controlled agents might be enough to control the behavior of a very large system.