Limit Sets for Natural Extensions of Schelling’s Segregation Model

Thomas Schelling developed an influential demographic model that illustrated how, even with relatively mild assumptions on each individual’s nearest neighbor preferences, an inte-grated city would likely unravel to a segregated city, even if all individuals prefer integration. Individuals in Schelling’s model cities are divided into two groups of equal number and each individual is ’happy ’ or ’unhappy ’ when the num-ber of similar neighbors cross a simple threshold. In this manuscript we consider natural extensions of Schelling’s original model to allow the two groups have different sizes and to allow different notions of happiness of an individual. We observe that differences in aggregation patterns of ma-jority and minority groups are highly sensitive to the happi-ness threshold; for low threshold, the differences are small, and when the threshold is raised, striking new patterns emerge. We also observe that when individuals strongly prefer to live integrated neighborhoods, the final states ex-hibit a new tessellated-like structure.