Schelling's model of residential segregation

8^th July 2020, 11:00
Alexandros Voudouris
University of Essex

Abstract

In this talk, we will discuss strategic games inspired by Schelling's model of residential segregation. These games are played on undirected graphs, with the set of agents partitioned into multiple types; agents of the same type are friends, and agents of different type are enemies. The agents are further classified as either stubborn or strategic: a stubborn agent occupies some node of the graph and never moves away, whereas a strategic agent aims to maximize the fraction of her friends in her neighbourhood (excluding or including herself). We consider two main variants of this model, in which the strategic agents can either jump to empty nodes of the graph, or swap positions with other strategic agents to increase their utility. We will present results about the existence, computational complexity and quality of equilibrium assignments in these games, both from a social welfare and from a diversity perspective. Finally, we will also discuss several generalizations, extensions and open questions.

Based on:
E. Elkind, J. Gan, A. Igarashi, W. Suksompong, and A. A. Voudouris. Schelling games on graphs. IJCAI 2019. (https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.07937)

A. Agarwal, E. Elkind, J. Gan, and A. A. Voudouris. Swap stability in Schelling games on graphs. AAAI 2020. (https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.02421)

P. Kanellopoulos, M. Kyropoulou, and A. A. Voudouris. Modified Schelling games. SAGT 2020. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.12149)