The Schelling Model
Last update: 21 Apr 2025 21:17First 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.
- See also:
- Agent-Based Modeling
- Cellular Automata
- Macroscopic Consequences of Microscopic Interactions
- Self-Organization
- Sociology
- Recommended, big picture:
- Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior
- Recommended, close-ups:
- Thomas C. Schelling, "Dynamic models of segregation", Journal of Mathematical Sociology 1 (1971): 143--186
- D. Stauffer, S. Solomon, "Ising, Schelling and Self-Organising Segregation", European Physical Journal B 57 (2007): 473--479, arxiv:physics/0701051
- Modesty forbids me to recommend:
- The lecture on the Schelling model in my class on statistics of inequality and discrimination, lecture 23 in the most recent (2022) iteration
- 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
