English

A game theoretic model of wealth distribution

Physics and Society 2017-09-12 v1 Dynamical Systems

Abstract

In this work we consider an agent based model in order to study the wealth distribution problem where the interchange is determined with a symmetric zero sum game. Simultaneously, the agents update their way of play trying to learn the optimal one. Here, the agents use mixed strategies. We study this model using both simulations and theoretical tools. We derive the equations for the learning mechanism, and we show that the mean strategy of the population satisfies an equation close to the classical replicator equation. Concerning the wealth distribution, there are two interesting situations depending on the equilibrium of the game. If the equilibrium is a pure strategy, the wealth distribution is fixed after some transient time, and those players which are close to optimal strategy are richer. When the game has an equilibrium in mixed strategies, the stationary wealth distribution is close to a Gamma distribution with variance depending on the coefficients of the game matrix. We compute theoretically their second moment in this case.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1709.03392,
  title  = {A game theoretic model of wealth distribution},
  author = {Juan Pablo Pinasco and Mauro Rodriguez Cartabia and Nicolas Saintier},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.03392},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

18 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T21:39:03.538Z