A Schelling-Opinion Model Based on Integration of Opinion Formation with Residential Segregation

Abstract

Residential segregation is a social and economic issue of concern, with implications at the economic, educational, and health levels. Fifty years ago, Schelling introduced a model of interacting agents of two types to warn that mild discriminatory mechanisms can still generate high global segregation levels. That work gave rise to many variants and was a pioneer in the agent-based approach to model social phenomena. In this work, we add a second feature to agents, their opinion state, giving rise to a variant that allows us to combine two mechanisms (social influence and mobility dynamics), which could relate to the emergence of polarized neighborhoods. Here, unhappy agents can move to another place (as in the classical Schelling model) or change opinions by imitating one of their neighbors. We show that these mechanisms create and sustain both segregation and polarization, by creating echo-chambers dynamically. We present results about the patterns in which clusters of different types and opinions arise under this model’s rules and study their variation depending on the model’s weight parameter, which determines the importance of each feature on the agent’s level of satisfaction with its neighborhood.