Eastern Economic Journal

, Volume 34, Issue 4, pp 480–503 | Cite as

Segregation and Strategic Neighborhood Interaction

  • Jason M Barr
  • Troy Tassier
Symposium Article
First Online:

Abstract

We introduce social interactions into the Schelling model of residential choice; these interactions take the form of a Prisoner's Dilemma game. We first study a Schelling model and a spatial Prisoner's Dilemma model separately to provide benchmarks for studying a combined model, with preferences over like-typed neighbors and payoffs in the spatial Prisoner's Dilemma game. We find that the presence of these additional social interactions may increase or decrease segregation compared to the standard Schelling model. If the social interactions result in cooperation then segregation is reduced, otherwise it can be increased.

Keywords

Schelling tipping model spatial Prisoner's Dilemma cooperation segregation 

JEL Classifications

C63 C73 D62 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

We thank Myong-Hun Chang for his helpful and insightful comments on an earlier draft. This paper was presented at one of the sessions sponsored by the NYC Computational Economics and Complexity Workshop at the 2007 Eastern Economic Association Meetings. We thank the session participants for their comments. Finally we thank three anonymous referees for their comments, which have helped to improve the paper. Any errors belong to the authors.

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Copyright information

© Eastern Economic Association 2008

Authors and Affiliations

  • Jason M Barr
    • 1
  • Troy Tassier
    • 2
  1. 1.Department of EconomicsRutgers UniversityNewarkUSA
  2. 2.Department of EconomicsFordham UniversityBronx

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