Single-Peaked Jump Schelling Games
Tobias Friedrich, Pascal Lenzner, Louise Molitor, Lars Seifert

TL;DR
This paper studies Jump Schelling Games with agents having single-peaked utility functions, analyzing equilibrium existence, game dynamics, and computational complexity related to residential segregation modeling.
Contribution
It introduces single-peaked utility functions into Jump Schelling Games, investigates equilibrium existence, and establishes complexity results for finding beneficial and equilibrium states.
Findings
Equilibria exist under specific conditions.
Stable states may not exist on simple topologies like paths or rings.
Computing beneficial states and equilibria is NP-hard.
Abstract
Schelling games model the wide-spread phenomenon of residential segregation in metropolitan areas from a game-theoretic point of view. In these games agents of different types each strategically select a node on a given graph that models the residential area to maximize their individual utility. The latter solely depends on the types of the agents on neighboring nodes and it has been a standard assumption to consider utility functions that are monotone in the number of same-type neighbors. This simplifying assumption has recently been challenged since sociological poll results suggest that real-world agents actually favor diverse neighborhoods. We contribute to the recent endeavor of investigating residential segregation models with realistic agent behavior by studying Jump Schelling Games with agents having a single-peaked utility function. In such games, there are empty nodes in the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsUrban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies · Transportation Planning and Optimization
