Mathematical modelling of decision making: The case of educational and employment choices in Ghana

The Ising model is used as a model for decision making involving social interaction and generalises socio-economic discrete choice model. This model is of a mean-field type as each individual interact with the rest of the individuals. In this work we study how educational and employment choices is inuenced by social attributes of gender and residence. The estimation procedure of Gallo, Contucci and Barra (2009) is used to estimate both the social and private incentive parameters of the model. The current work differ from that in Gallo, Contucci and Barra (2009) in two regards: (a) population is divided into subgroups according to socio-economic attributes with unequal subgroup sizes and (b) different attributes values are considered. From the estimates place of residence seems to have significant effect on the type of employment and educational choices an individual makes than gender.