English

Wealth exchange under ceiling and flooring constraints: a modified Bennati-Dragulescu-Yakovenko model

Probability 2026-02-03 v1

Abstract

We investigate the classical Bennati-Dragulescu-Yakovenko (BDY) dollar exchange model introduced in \cite{dragulescu_statistical_2000} where the effects of wealth ceiling and wealth flooring are explored. In our model, NN identical economical agents involved in the BDY game are also subjected to certain policies issued by a (artificial) government, which prevent agents whose wealth exceeds some prescribed threshold value (denoted by bN+b \in \mathbb N_+) from receiving money and which prohibit agents whose wealth falls below certain threshold value (denoted by aNa \in \mathbb N) from giving out their money. We derive a mean-field system of coupled nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) governing the evolution of the distribution of money as the number of agents NN tends to infinity and study the large time behavior of the resulting ODE system. The impact of a wealth cap and a wealth floor on economic inequality (measured by the Gini index) will also be explored numerically.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.00988,
  title  = {Wealth exchange under ceiling and flooring constraints: a modified Bennati-Dragulescu-Yakovenko model},
  author = {Fei Cao and Sebastien Motsch and Wendy Garcia Umbarita},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.00988},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

25 pages, 6 figures