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Formation of segregated and integrated groups

2007; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 35; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/s00182-006-0064-z

1432-1270

Alison Watts,

Economic theories and models

A model of group formation is presented such that the number of groups is fixed, and a person can only join a group if the group's members approve the person's joining. Agents have either local status preferences (each agent wants to be the highest status agent in his group) or global status preferences (each agent wants to join the highest status group that she can join). For both preference types, conditions are provided which guarantee the existence of a segregated stable partition such that similar people are grouped together, and conditions are provided which guarantee the existence of an integrated stable partition such that dissimilar people are grouped together. Additionally, in a dynamic framework we show that if a new empty group is added to a segregated stable partition, then integration may occur.