Speaker
Description
The Curie-Weiss model is used to model decision making involving social interaction and generalises socio-economic discrete choice model. In this work we study how educational and employment choices are influenced by social attributes of gender and residence of individuals. The model has a social and a private incentive part with coefficients which are the measure of influence individuals have on each other and the external influence which is dependent on the vector of socio-economic attribute respectively. These coefficients are the parameters of the model. There is a satisfaction function of the model representing the utility of individuals as a result of their choices. It is reasonable to assume that individuals with same socio-economic attributes have the same behaviour. The work focuses on how the population of size N is divided into subgroups according to their socio-economic attributes with unequal subgroup sizes and with different attributes function contrary to an earlier work of Contucci et al. Each individual in the population of size N is assigned to two of socio-economic attributes of gender and residence. For gender, an individual could be male or female and for residence an individual could be living in the rural or urban. For this purpose, the population is divided into 4 subgroups, where the individuals in the same subgroup share the same gender and residence. Average decisions for the four groups are calculated from data and fitted into our Currie-Weiss model. Least squares method is used to estimate the parameters of the model. The estimates of the parameters indicate that place of residence has a significant effect on the educational level attained by an individual and the type of employment choices they make.
