Effect of individual desires on the segregation of network society

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1620286 (Table of Contents)

In this thesis, effect of individual desires on the segregation of society is investigated and new methods are defined to distinguish the outcomes. According to Schelling’s segregation model, agents have tolerance and when the ratio of dissimilar neighbors exceeds the tolerance level, agents change their place. However, some sociological studies show that people can have an incentive to come together with dissimilar ones. Thus, a desire for diversity can be defined in simulations. According to simulation results, even if the desire for diversity is low, existence of this desire decreases the segregation level of society. We then defined di erent utility functions which include tolerance and desire for diversity and saw under which utility functions agents segregate, integrate or form an inverse homophilic network. Moreover, we observed that there can be networks with the same traditional segregation indices, but different patterns. We distinguished these patterns with a new measure named neighborhood distribution function. Then the motifs that the agents form with their neighbors are investigated, and we showed that different motifs lie behind the differences in network patterns. Motifs with different clustering coefficients might ile policy makers offer regulations which can change individuals’ utility functions, it should not be ignored that these changes might affect the segregation level of society as well as the neighborhood motifs which might give rise to new social dynamics.