Formation of Segregated and Integrated Groups

Abstract

There are many situations where people join groups, the number of groups is fixed, and where a person can only join a new group if the new group approves the person's joining. We examine such situations where agents are concerned with either local status (each agent wants to be the highest status agent in his group) or global status (each agent wants to join the highest status group that she can join). For both cases, conditions are provided under which a segregated stable partition of groups form where similar people are grouped together and conditions are provided under which an integrated stable partition of groups form where dissimilar people are grouped together. We also show that the addition of an empty group (or location) to a segregated stable partition of groups may cause integration to occur.

An Economic Model of Friendship: Homophily, Minorities and Segregation

“…25 For a discussion see Page (2007). 26 For an example of social or status based preferences, see Watts (2007). 27 See Bramoullé and Kranton (2007) for more discussion of such trade-offs in a risk-sharing environment.…”

“…29 Instead, it is governed by the relative sizes of populations, agents' preferences and the implications for their matching decisions, and feedbacks in the matching process which govern the mix of friendships that individuals are faced with forming. Two simplifications that we have made in the model are the continuous time matching and the fact that the mix of types that agents meet is deterministic.…”

Status-Seeking in Hedonic Games with Heterogeneous Players

“…More closely, our study is related to Milchtiach and Winter (2002) and Watts (2007) who also discuss segregation within a status-based preferences setting. We build upon the work of Watts (2007) in defining our notions of local and global status and the properties of segregation and integration.…”

“…We build upon the work of Watts (2007) in defining our notions of local and global status and the properties of segregation and integration. As in Watts (2007), our agents prefer to have a higher local status measured by their relative position in the group. While we measure the relative position as the distance from the average, she captures it by the rank of the individual in the group.…”

Balanced Weights and Three-Sided Coalition Formation

“…In particular, we assume players' preferences to be based on the substitutability between local and global status that an agent attains in the corresponding coalitions (cf. [10,11]). In this framework, we show that if global status is weighted in a balanced way, then a core stable coalition structure always exists.…”