Polarization and Segregation through Conformity Pressure and Voluntary Migration: Simulation Analysis of Co-Evolutionary Dynamics

Dai Zusai and Futao Lu
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Dai Zusai: Department of Economics, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA
Futao Lu: Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

Games, 2017, vol. 8, issue 4, 1-14

Abstract: While conformity pressures people to assimilate in a community, an individual occasionally migrates among communities when the individual feels discomfort. These two factors cause segregation and cultural diversity within communities in the society. By embedding a migration dynamic into Kuran and Sandholm’s model (2008) of preference evolution, we build an agent-based model to see how the variance of preferences in the entire society quantitatively changes over time. We find from the Monte-Carlo simulations that, while preferences assimilate within a community , self-selected migrations enlarge the diversity of preferences over communities in the society. We further study how the arrival rate of migration opportunities and the degree of conformity pressures affect the variance of preferences.

Keywords: segregation; assimilation; polarization; cultural discontents; evolutionary dynamics; conformity; simulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C C7 C70 C71 C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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