IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/2109.04324.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A Tale of Two (and More) Altruists

Author

Listed:
  • B. De Bruyne
  • J. Randon-Furling
  • S. Redner

Abstract

We introduce a minimalist dynamical model of wealth evolution and wealth sharing among $N$ agents as a platform to compare the relative merits of altruism and individualism. In our model, the wealth of each agent independently evolves by diffusion. For a population of altruists, whenever any agent reaches zero wealth (that is, the agent goes bankrupt), the remaining wealth of the other $N-1$ agents is equally shared among all. The population is collectively defined to be bankrupt when its total wealth falls below a specified small threshold value. For individualists, each time an agent goes bankrupt (s)he is considered to be "dead" and no wealth redistribution occurs. We determine the evolution of wealth in these two societies. Altruism leads to more global median wealth at early times; eventually, however, the longest-lived individualists accumulate most of the wealth and are richer and more long lived than the altruists.

Suggested Citation

  • B. De Bruyne & J. Randon-Furling & S. Redner, 2021. "A Tale of Two (and More) Altruists," Papers 2109.04324, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2109.04324
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.04324
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2109.04324. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.