Related papers: Inequality of Opportunity and Income Redistributio…
Public and private institutions must often allocate scare resources under uncertainty. Banks, for example, extend credit to loan applicants based in part on their estimated likelihood of repaying a loan. But when the quality of information…
We present a new way of estimation of the role of chance in achieving success, by comparing the empirical data from 100-meter dash competitions (one of the sports disciplines with the most stringent controls of external randomness), with…
We review recent numerical results on the role of talent and luck in getting success by means of a schematic agent-based model. In general the role of luck is found to be very relevant in order to get success, while talent is necessary but…
Two critical questions about intergenerational outcomes are: one, whether significant barriers or traps exist between different social or economic strata; and two, the extent to which intergenerational outcomes do (or can be used to) affect…
I discuss economic and social sources of inequality and elaborate on the role of social networks in inequality, economic immobility, and economic inefficiencies. The lens of social networks clarifies how the entanglement of people's…
In the last decade, a large body of literature has been developed to explain the universal features of inequality in terms of income and wealth. By now, it is established that the distributions of income and wealth in various economies show…
A greedy personality is usually accompanied by arrogance and confidence. This work investigates the cooperation success condition in the context of biased payoff allocation and self-confidence. The first component allows the organizer in a…
Income redistribution is the transfer of income from some individuals to others directly or indirectly by means of social mechanisms, such as taxation, public services and so on. Employing a spatial public goods game, we study the influence…
Recent studies have found evidence of a negative association between economic complexity and inequality at the country level. Moreover, evidence suggests that sophisticated economies tend to outsource products that are less desirable (e.g.…
The scale and terms of aggregate borrowing in an economy depend on the manner in which wealth is distributed across potential creditors with heterogeneous beliefs about the future. This distribution evolves over time as uncertainty is…
We derive the most probable distribution of resources for a simple society. We find that a probabilistic analysis forbids both too much and too less equity, and selects instead a minimally ordered state. We give the detailed calculations…
How do socioeconomically unequal screening practices impact access to elite firms and what policies might reduce inequality? Using personnel data from elite U.S. and European multinational corporations recruiting from an elite Indian…
Patterns of wins and losses in pairwise contests, such as occur in sports and games, consumer research and paired comparison studies, and human and animal social hierarchies, are commonly analyzed using probabilistic models that allow one…
Inequality and its consequences are the subject of intense recent debate. Using a simplified model of the economy, we address the relation between inequality and liquidity, the latter understood as the frequency of economic exchanges.…
If wealthier people have advantages in having higher returns than poor, inequality will unequivocally increase, but is equal opportunity enough to prevent it? According to several models in economics and econophysics, no. They all display…
The form of political polarization where citizens develop strongly negative attitudes towards out-party policies and members has become increasingly prominent across many democracies. Economic hardship and social inequality, as well as…
We can overcome uncertainty with uncertainty. Using randomness in our choices and in what we control, and hence in the decision making process, could potentially offset the uncertainty inherent in the environment and yield better outcomes.…
Ranking algorithms play a crucial role in online platforms ranging from search engines to recommender systems. In this paper, we identify a surprising consequence of popularity-based rankings: the fewer the items reporting a given signal,…
Predictive algorithms are now used to help distribute a large share of our society's resources and sanctions, such as healthcare, loans, criminal detentions, and tax audits. Under the right circumstances, these algorithms can improve the…
This paper attempts to find a relationship between agents' risk aversion and inequality of incomes. Specifically, a model is proposed for the evolution in time of surplus/deficit distribution, and the long-time distributions are…