The Schelling model of segregation was introduced in economics to show how micro-motives can influence macro-behavior. Agents on a lattice have two colors and try to move to a different location if the number of their neighbors with a different color exceeds some threshold. Simulations reveal that even such mild local color preferences, or homophily, are sufficient to cause segregation. In this work, we propose a stochastic generalization of the Schelling model, based on both race and wealth, to understand how carefully architected placement of incentives, such as urban infrastructure, might affect segregation. In our model, each agent is assigned one of two colors along with a label, rich or poor. Further, we designate certain vertices on the lattice as “urban sites,” providing civic infrastructure that most benefits the poorer population, thus incentivizing the occupation of such vertices by poor agents of either color. We look at the stationary distribution of a Markov process reflecting these preferences to understand the long-term effects. We prove that when incentives are large enough, we will have ”urbanization of poverty,” an observed effect whereby poor people tend to congregate on urban sites. Moreover, even when homophily preferences are very small, if the incentives are large and there is income inequality in the two-color classes, we can get racial segregation on urban sites but integration on non-urban sites. In contrast, we find an overall mitigation of segregation when the urban sites are distributed throughout the lattice and the incentives for urban sites exceed the homophily biases. We prove that in this case, no matter how strong homophily preferences are, it will be exponentially unlikely that a configuration chosen from stationarity will have large, homogeneous clusters of agents of either color, suggesting we will have racial integration with high probability.
more »
« less
Phase transition in one-dimensional excitable media with variable interaction range
We investigate two discrete models of excitable media on a one-dimensional integer lattice ℤ: the κ-color Cyclic Cellular Automaton (CCA) and the κ-color Firefly Cellular Automaton (FCA). In both models, sites are assigned uniformly random colors from ℤ/κℤ. Neighboring sites with colors within a specified interaction range r tend to synchronize their colors upon a particular local event of 'excitation'. We establish that there are three phases of CCA/FCA on ℤ as we vary the interaction range r. First, if r is too small (undercoupled), there are too many non-interacting pairs of colors, and the whole graph ℤ will be partitioned into non-interacting intervals of sites with no excitation within each interval. If r is within a sweet spot (critical), then we show the system clusters into ever-growing monochromatic intervals. For the critical interaction range r=⌊κ/2⌋, we show the density of edges of differing colors at time t is Θ(t−1/2) and each site excites Θ(t1/2) times up to time t. Lastly, if r is too large (overcoupled), then neighboring sites can excite each other and such 'defects' will generate waves of excitation at a constant rate so that each site will get excited at least at a linear rate. For the special case of FCA with r=⌊2/κ⌋+1, we show that every site will become (κ+1)-periodic eventually.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2232241
- PAR ID:
- 10535227
- Publisher / Repository:
- arxiv
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- arXiv
- ISSN:
- NA
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Following nuclear decay, a daughter atom in a solid will "stay in place" if the recoil energy is less than the threshold for displacement. At high temperature, it may subsequently undergo long-range diffusion or some other kind of atomic motion. In this paper, motion of 111Cd tracer probe atoms is reconsidered following electron-capture decay of 111In in the series of In3R phases (R= rare-earth). The motion produces nuclear relaxation that was measured using the method of perturbed angular correlation. Previous measurements along the entire series of In3R phases appeared to show a crossover between two diffusional regimes. While relaxation for R= Lu-Tb is consistent with a simple vacancy diffusion mechanism, relaxation for R= Nd-La is not. More recent measurements in Pd3R phases demonstrate that the site-preference of the parent In-probe changes along the series and suggests that the same behavior occurs for daughter Cd-probes. The anomalous motion observed for R= Nd-La is attributed to "lanthanide expansion" occurring towards La end-member phases. For In3La, the Cd-tracer is found to jump away from its original location on the In-sublattice in an extremely short time, of order 0.5 ns at 1000 K and 1.2 ms at room temperature, a residence time too short to be consistent with defect-mediated diffusion. Several scenarios that can explain the relaxation are presented based on the hypothesis that daughter Cd-probes first jump to neighboring interstitial sites and then are either trapped and immobilized, undergo long-range diffusion, or persist in a localized motion in a cage.more » « less
-
For positive integers 𝑛, 𝑟, 𝑠 with 𝑟 > 𝑠, the set-coloring Ramsey number 𝑅(𝑛; 𝑟, 𝑠) is the minimum 𝑁 such that if every edge of the complete graph 𝐾_𝑁 receives a set of 𝑠 colors from a palette of 𝑟 colors, then there is guaranteed to be a monochromatic clique on 𝑛 vertices, that is, a subset of 𝑛 vertices where all of the edges between them receive a common color. In particular, the case 𝑠 = 1 corresponds to the classical multicolor Ramsey number. We prove general upper and lower bounds on 𝑅(𝑛; 𝑟, 𝑠) which imply that 𝑅(𝑛; 𝑟, 𝑠) = 2^Θ(𝑛𝑟) if 𝑠/𝑟 is bounded away from 0 and 1. The upper bound extends an old result of Erdős and Szemerédi, who treated the case 𝑠 = 𝑟 − 1, while the lower bound exploits a connection to error-correcting codes. We also study the analogous problem for hypergraphs.more » « less
-
Abstract This is a continuation, and conclusion, of our study of bounded solutions u of the semilinear parabolic equation $$u_t=u_{xx}+f(u)$$ u t = u xx + f ( u ) on the real line whose initial data $$u_0=u(\cdot ,0)$$ u 0 = u ( · , 0 ) have finite limits $$\theta ^\pm $$ θ ± as $$x\rightarrow \pm \infty $$ x → ± ∞ . We assume that f is a locally Lipschitz function on $$\mathbb {R}$$ R satisfying minor nondegeneracy conditions. Our goal is to describe the asymptotic behavior of u ( x , t ) as $$t\rightarrow \infty $$ t → ∞ . In the first two parts of this series we mainly considered the cases where either $$\theta ^-\ne \theta ^+$$ θ - ≠ θ + ; or $$\theta ^\pm =\theta _0$$ θ ± = θ 0 and $$f(\theta _0)\ne 0$$ f ( θ 0 ) ≠ 0 ; or else $$\theta ^\pm =\theta _0$$ θ ± = θ 0 , $$f(\theta _0)=0$$ f ( θ 0 ) = 0 , and $$\theta _0$$ θ 0 is a stable equilibrium of the equation $${{\dot{\xi }}}=f(\xi )$$ ξ ˙ = f ( ξ ) . In all these cases we proved that the corresponding solution u is quasiconvergent—if bounded—which is to say that all limit profiles of $$u(\cdot ,t)$$ u ( · , t ) as $$t\rightarrow \infty $$ t → ∞ are steady states. The limit profiles, or accumulation points, are taken in $$L^\infty _{loc}(\mathbb {R})$$ L loc ∞ ( R ) . In the present paper, we take on the case that $$\theta ^\pm =\theta _0$$ θ ± = θ 0 , $$f(\theta _0)=0$$ f ( θ 0 ) = 0 , and $$\theta _0$$ θ 0 is an unstable equilibrium of the equation $${{\dot{\xi }}}=f(\xi )$$ ξ ˙ = f ( ξ ) . Our earlier quasiconvergence theorem in this case involved some restrictive technical conditions on the solution, which we now remove. Our sole condition on $$u(\cdot ,t)$$ u ( · , t ) is that it is nonoscillatory (has only finitely many critical points) at some $$t\ge 0$$ t ≥ 0 . Since it is known that oscillatory bounded solutions are not always quasiconvergent, our result is nearly optimal.more » « less
-
Tensor completion exhibits an interesting computational-statistical gap in terms of the number of samples needed to perform tensor estimation. While there are only Θ(tn) degrees of freedom in a t-order tensor with n^t entries, the best known polynomial time algorithm requires O(n^t/2 ) samples in order to guarantee consistent estimation. In this paper, we show that weak side information is sufficient to reduce the sample complexity to O(n). The side information consists of a weight vector for each of the modes which is not orthogonal to any of the latent factors along that mode; this is significantly weaker than assuming noisy knowledge of the subspaces. We provide an algorithm that utilizes this side information to produce a consistent estimator with O(n^1+κ ) samples for any small constant κ > 0. We also provide experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets that validate our theoretical insights.more » « less
An official website of the United States government

