The Schelling Model
Last update: 21 Apr 2025 21:17
First version: 21 July 2012
An extremely beautiful model with profound things to say about how social
outcomes, arising entirely from individual actions, can nonetheless be things
which nobody wants. It also has absolutely nothing to do with origins of racial
segregation as actually practiced in America.
Recommended, big picture:
- Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior
To read:
- William Easterly, "Empirics of Strategic Interdependence: The Case of the Racial Tipping Point" NBER working paper 15069
- Laetitia Gauvin, Jean Vannimenus, Jean-Pierre Nadal, "Phase diagram of a Schelling segregation model", European Physical Journal B 70 (2009): 293--304, arxiv:0903.4694
- Rainer Hegselmann, "Thomas C. Schelling and James M. Sakoda: The Intellectual, Technical, and Social History of a Model",
Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 20:3 (2017): 15 [via]
- Adam Douglas Henry, Pawel Pralat, and Cun-Quan Zhang, "Emergence of segregation in evolving social networks", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 108 (2011): 8605--8610
- Ryan Muldoon, Tony Smith and Michael Weisberg, "Segregation That No One Seeks", Philosophy of Science 79 (2012): 38--62
- Abhinav Singh, Dmitri Vainchtein, Howard Weiss, "Schelling's Segregation Model: Parameters, Scaling, and Aggregation", arxiv:0711.2212
- Dejan Vinkovic and Alan Kirman, "A Physical Analogue of the
Schelling Model", Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences 103 (2006):
19261--19265
- Yu Xie and Xiang Zhou, "Modeling individual-level heterogeneity in racial residential segregation", Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 109 (2012): 11646--11651