Writings on Relative Deprivation and Happiness
// Agent-based Computational Analysis of the Relative Deprivation Mechanisms
In 2009, Mohamed Cherkaoui and Peter Hamilton edited a monumental Festschrift to celebrate the work of the French sociologist Raymond Boudon.
My contribution payed homage to Raymond Boudon by going back to his game-theoretic analysis of potential mechanisms underlying the phenomenon of relative deprivation. In particular, I translated Boudon’s original model into an agent-based computational model and performed an extensive sensitivity analysis (involving approximately 26,000 parameter combinations) of several variants of the model. The results confirm and extend Boudon’s original intuition (as well as Kosaka's and Yamaguchi's follows-up) according to which the classical, counter-intuitive aggregate patterns “more opportunities, more dissatisfied actors” only emerges in a specific region of the model’s parameter space.


