are Schelling-style preference effects robust?
Author InfoMark Fossett David R Dietrich Abstract This paper investigates the effects of city size, shape, and form, and neighborhood size and shape in agent-based models of residential segregation. We find that, in many key respects, model-generated segregation outcomes are not influenced in important ways by variation in these factors. For example, the expression of segregation based on agent preferences for coethnic contact in agent-based models does not vary with city size, city shape, city form, or the shape of neighborhoods involved in agent vision, or the use of distance-decay functions for evaluating neighbors. These findings indicate that results obtained from model-based segregation studies are likely to be robust relative to choices regarding these aspects of model specification. We do find important effects of the size or scale of neighborhoods involved in agent vision: model-generated segregation outcomes vary in complex ways with agent vision. Significantly, however, the
