Related papers: Inequality of Opportunity and Income Redistributio…
Cooperation is a key driver of human social progress. Studies of the evolution of cooperation typically assume a deterministic outcome for social interactions. But in real-world social interactions, interaction outcomes are often subject to…
In the so-called ``fair'' models of peer-to-peer wealth exchanges, economic inequality tends to reach its maximum value asymptotically. This global trend is evident as the richest continuously accumulate a larger share of wealth at the…
We consider a simple theoretical model to investigate the impact of inheritances on the wealth distribution. Wealth is described as a finite resource, which remains constant over different generations and is divided equally among offspring.…
Many policies allocate harms or benefits that are uncertain in nature: they produce distributions over the population in which individuals have different probabilities of incurring harm or benefit. Comparing different policies thus involves…
An increasingly large number of experiments study the labor productivity effects of automation technologies such as generative algorithms. A popular question in these experiments relates to inequality: does the technology increase output…
Various papers demonstrate the importance of inequality, poverty and the size of the middle class for economic growth. When explaining why these measures of the income distribution are added to the growth regression, it is often mentioned…
Economic competition between humans leads to income inequality, but, so far, there has been little understanding of underlying quantitative mechanisms governing such a collective behavior. We analyze datasets of household income from 67…
Equal opportunity is central to the concept of meritocracy. Opportunity and leadership should go to the people most qualified by performance, and not on the basis of arbitrary or irrelevant attributes. This principle is arguably most…
The outcomes of elections, product sales, and the structure of social connections are all determined by the choices individuals make when presented with a set of options, so understanding the factors that contribute to choice is crucial. Of…
Across income groups and countries, individual citizens perceive economic inequality spectacularly wrong. These misperceptions have far-reaching consequences, as it is perceived inequality, not actualinequality informing redistributive…
In this letter we present a stochastic dynamic model which can explain economic cycles. We show that the macroscopic description yields a complex dynamical landscape consisting of multiple stable fixed points, each corresponding to a split…
Over the last decades, the distribution of income and wealth has been deteriorating in many countries, leading to increased inequalities within and between societies. This tendency has revived the interest in the subject greatly, yet it…
Simple agent based exchange models are a commonplace in the study of wealth distribution of artificial societies. Generally, each agent is characterized by its wealth and by a risk-aversion factor, and random exchanges between agents allow…
Over the past two decades, the notion of implicit bias has come to serve as an important component in our understanding of discrimination in activities such as hiring, promotion, and school admissions. Research on implicit bias posits that…
We construct a model of an exchange economy in which agents trade assets contingent on an observable signal, the probability of which depends on public opinion. The agents in our model are replaced occasionally and each person updates…
Statistical inferential results generally come with a measure of reliability for decision-making purposes. For a policy implementer, the value of implementing published policy research depends critically upon this reliability. For a policy…
Goods and services -- public housing, medical appointments, schools -- are often allocated to individuals who rank them similarly but differ in their preference intensities. We characterize optimal allocation rules when individual…
This paper investigates the interactions among consumption/savings, investment, and retirement choices with income disaster. We consider low-income people who are exposed to income disaster so that they retire involuntarily when income…
A central problem in business concerns the optimal allocation of limited resources to a set of available tasks, where the payoff of these tasks is inherently uncertain. In credit card fraud detection, for instance, a bank can only assign a…
This study analyzes the role of meritocracy, media influence, and scheduled theory from multiple perspectives as mechanisms that maintain inequality in social classes. Social inequality exists in complex forms in the educational, media, and…