MATLAB Fall 2015 Research Plan (Template)

• Group Name: GESS what?!
• Group participants names: Balerna Camillo; Lanzetti Nicolas; Moscato Giovanni; Neumann Marc
• Project Title: Social aggregation in a multicultural environment

General Introduction

It's interesting to analyse and understand the cultural and social motivations behind aggregation and segregation of individuals. In any heterogeneous social environment (such as big cities) we can observe both isolation of groups of people (e.g. "China Town") and cultural integration.

Social separation has always existed and has gained particular importance in the last decades thanks to people migrational behaviour.

The Model

The model will be based on the following factors:

• Satisfaction factor (how do single agents "feel" in their condition) depends on cultural affinity with neighbours;
• Segregation index (how spread are different cultures).

Within the problem of segretion, cultural background strongly influences the actions of the single agent. Therefore a combination of both Schelling's and Axelrod's model is appropriate.

Fundamental Questions

How easy is it for a group of heterogeneous cultures to successfully interact and coexist with each other? In what circumstances do people prefer to relocate rather than adapt to other's culture? How does the exigency of the single agents influence the output of our simulation? To what extent do we observe ghettos? How does population density play a factor in this processes?

Expected Results

We expect increasing strength in spatial separation as the cultural differences enlarge. On the other hand we predict that integration gets easier in a more homogeneous cultural environment.

References

1. http://nifty.stanford.edu/2014/mccown-schelling-model-segregation/

2. R. Axelrod, The Dissemination of Culture, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1997

Research Methods

Agent-Based model.

Other

(mention datasets you are going to use)