Related papers: Can Rising Consumption Deepen Inequality?

Many models of market dynamics make use of the idea of conservative wealth exchanges among economic agents. A few years ago an exchange model using extremal dynamics was developed and a very interesting result was obtained: a self-generated…

In capitalist societies, only a single right can be fully exerted without constraints of any kind: the limitless accumulation of wealth. Such imperative or prime axiom is the ultimate cause of the raising waves of inequalities observed…

We present a minimal agent-based model of interacting agents characterized by their wealth to study taxation and inequality in a non-conservative economy. Wealth evolves through an extremal stochastic replacement process in which the…

We investigate the relation between economic growth and equality in a modified version of the agent-based asset exchange model (AEM). The modified model is a driven system that for a range of parameter space is effectively ergodic in the…

Binary kinetic exchange models, where money is shuffled between two agents at a time, reproduce the Boltzmann Gibbs exponential wealth distribution but cannot address the multi party trades common in real markets. We generalize the exchange…

We consider a model of power distribution in a social system where a set of agents play a simple game on a graph: the probability of winning each round is proportional to the agent's current power, and the winner gets more power as a…

Income and wealth allocation are foundational components of how economies operate. These are complex distributions, and it is hard to get a real sense for their dynamics using simplifications like average or median. One metric that…

Inequality is an inherent part of our lives: we see it in the distribution of incomes, talents, resources, and citations, amongst many others. Its intensity varies across different environments: from relatively evenly distributed ones, to…

Big data has exponentially dilated consumption demand and speed, but can they all be converted to utility? We argue about the measures of consumption and utility acquisition in CRRA utility function under the condition of big data…

We present a simplified model for the exploitation of finite resources by interacting agents, where each agent receives a random fraction of the available resources. An extremal dynamics ensures that the poorest agent has a chance to change…

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…

We introduce an auto-regressive model which captures the growing nature of realistic markets. In our model agents do not trade with other agents, they interact indirectly only through a market. Change of their wealth depends, linearly on…

"The rich are getting richer" implies that the population income distributions are getting more right skewed and heavily tailed. For such distributions, the mean is not the best measure of the center, but the classical indices of income…

We study the effect of altruism in two simple asset exchange models: the yard sale model (winner gets a random fraction of the poorer player's wealth) and the theft and fraud model (winner gets a random fraction of the loser's wealth). We…

We study consumption behaviour in systems with heterogeneous interacting agents. Two different models are introduced, respectively with long and short range interactions among agents. At any time step an agent decides whether or not to…

A simple generative model of a foraging society generates significant wealth inequalities from identical agents on an equal opportunity landscape. These inequalities arise in both equilibrium and non-equilibrium regimes with some societies…

Consumption practices are determined by a combination of economic, social, and cultural forces. We posit that lower economic constraints leave more room to diversify consumption along cultural and social aspects in the form of omnivorous or…

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century puts forth a logically consistent explanation for changes in income and wealth inequality patterns. However, while rich in data, the book provides no formal empirical testing for its…

In the context of a large class of stochastic processes used to describe the dynamics of wealth growth, we prove a set of inequalities establishing necessary and sufficient conditions in order to avoid infinite wealth concentration. These…

Price of anarchy quantifies the degradation of social welfare in games due to the lack of a centralized authority that can enforce the optimal outcome. At its antipodes, mechanism design studies how to ameliorate these effects by…