Kinetic Models of Wealth Distribution with Extreme Inequality: Numerical Study of Their Stability against Random Exchanges

Abstract

In view of some recent reports on global wealth inequality, where a small number (often a handful) of people own more wealth than 50% of the world’s population, we explored if kinetic exchange models of markets could ever capture features where a significant fraction of wealth can concentrate in the hands of a few as the market size N approaches infinity. One existing example of such a kinetic exchange model is the Chakraborti or Yard-Sale model; in the absence of tax redistribution, etc., all wealth ultimately condenses into the hands of a single individual (for any value of N), and the market dynamics stop. With tax redistribution, etc., steady-state dynamics are shown to have remarkable applicability in many cases in our extremely unequal world. We show that another kinetic exchange model (called the Banerjee model) has intriguing intrinsic dynamics, where only ten rich traders or agents possess about 99.98% of the total wealth in the steady state (without any tax, etc., like external manipulation) for any large N value. We will discuss the statistical features of this model using Monte Carlo simulations. We will also demonstrate that if each trader has a non-zero probability f of engaging in random exchanges, then these condensations of wealth (e.g., 100% in the hand of one agent in the Chakraborti model, or about 99.98% in the hands of ten agents in the Banerjee model) disappear in the large N limit. Moreover, due to the built-in possibility of random exchange dynamics in the earlier proposed Goswami–Sen model, where the exchange probability decreases with the inverse power of the wealth difference between trading pairs, one does not see any wealth condensation phenomena. In this paper, we explore these aspects of statistics of these intriguing models.