Effects of introduction of new resources and fragmentation of existing resources on limiting wealth distribution in asset exchange models

Authored by M. Ali Saif, Prashant M. Gade

Date Published: 2009-03-01

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2008.11.004

Sponsors: Government of Yemen

Platforms: No platforms listed

Model Documentation: Other Narrative Mathematical description

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

Pareto law, which states that wealth distribution in societies has a power-law tail, has been the subject of intensive investigations in the statistical physics community. Several models have been employed to explain this behavior. However, most of the agent based models assume the conservation of number of agents and wealth. Both these assumptions are unrealistic. In this paper, we study the limiting wealth distribution when one or both of these assumptions are not valid. Given the universality of the law, we have tried to Study the wealth distribution from the asset exchange models point of view. We consider models in which (a) new agents enter the market at a constant rate (b) richer agents fragment with higher probability introducing newer agents in the system (c) both fragmentation and entry of new agents is taking place. While models (a) and (c) do not conserve total wealth or number of agents, model (b) conserves total wealth. All these models lead to a power-law tail in the wealth distribution pointing to the possibility that more generalized asset exchange models could help us to explain the emergence of a power-law tail in wealth distribution. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Tags

econophysics Power-law Fragmentation Wealth distribution Yard-sale