Symmetric preferences, asymmetric outcomes: Tipping dynamics in an open-city segregation model
Abstract
Schelling's model of segregation demonstrates that even in the absence of social or governmental interventions, individuals with mild in-group preferences can self-organize into strongly segregated neighborhoods. Many variants of this celebrated model have been proposed by assuming agents tend to increase their satisfaction. Complementary to this traditional, utility-based approach, we model residential moves using satisfaction-independent reaction rates in a spatially extended chemical reaction network. The resulting model exhibits an emergent phenomenon: despite symmetric in-group preferences, the system undergoes a tipping transition at a critical preference level, beyond which one agent type dominates. We characterize this asymmetric phase transition in details using mean-field analysis, numerical simulations and finite size scaling methods. We find that while the transition shares key features with the Ising universality class, such as Z2 symmetry breaking and similar exponent ratios, the full set of critical exponents does not match any known universality class.