IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/cesptp/hal-01138383.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The impact of randomness on the distribution of wealth: Some economic aspects of the Wright-Fisher diffusion process

Author

Listed:
  • Nicolas Bouleau

    (CIRED - centre international de recherche sur l'environnement et le développement - Cirad - Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AgroParisTech - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Christophe Chorro

    (CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

In this paper we consider some elementary and fair zero-sum games of chance to study the impact of random effects on the wealth distribution of N interacting players. Even if an exhaustive analytical study of such games between many players may be tricky, numerical experiments highlight interesting asymptotic properties. From a mathematical perspective, we interestingly recover for small and high-frequency transactions some diffusion limits extensively used in population genetics. Finally, the impact of small tax rates on the preceding dynamics is discussed for several regulation mechanisms.

Suggested Citation

  • Nicolas Bouleau & Christophe Chorro, 2017. "The impact of randomness on the distribution of wealth: Some economic aspects of the Wright-Fisher diffusion process," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) hal-01138383, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:cesptp:hal-01138383
    DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2017.03.017
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-01138383v2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://hal.science/hal-01138383v2/document
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.physa.2017.03.017?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Joseph E Fargione & Clarence Lehman & Stephen Polasky, 2011. "Entrepreneurs, Chance, and the Deterministic Concentration of Wealth," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 6(7), pages 1-6, July.
    2. Yuri Biondi & Simone Righi, 2019. "Inequality, mobility and the financial accumulation process: a computational economic analysis," Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination, Springer;Society for Economic Science with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents, vol. 14(1), pages 93-119, March.
    3. James B. McDonald, 2008. "Some Generalized Functions for the Size Distribution of Income," Economic Studies in Inequality, Social Exclusion, and Well-Being, in: Duangkamon Chotikapanich (ed.), Modeling Income Distributions and Lorenz Curves, chapter 3, pages 37-55, Springer.
    4. Jess Benhabib & Alberto Bisin & Shenghao Zhu, 2011. "The Distribution of Wealth and Fiscal Policy in Economies With Finitely Lived Agents," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 79(1), pages 123-157, January.
    5. Jean-Philippe Bouchaud & Marc Mezard, 2000. "Wealth condensation in a simple model of economy," Science & Finance (CFM) working paper archive 500026, Science & Finance, Capital Fund Management.
    6. Fernholz, Ricardo & Fernholz, Robert, 2014. "Instability and concentration in the distribution of wealth," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 251-269.
    7. Christophe Chorro, 2016. "A simple probabilistic approach of the Yard-Sale model," Post-Print hal-01387028, HAL.
    8. Guess, Harry A., 1973. "On the weak convergence of Wright-Fisher model," Stochastic Processes and their Applications, Elsevier, vol. 1(3), pages 287-306, July.
    9. Bouchaud, Jean-Philippe & Mézard, Marc, 2000. "Wealth condensation in a simple model of economy," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 282(3), pages 536-545.
    10. Anirban Chakraborti, 2002. "Distributions Of Money In Model Markets Of Economy," International Journal of Modern Physics C (IJMPC), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 13(10), pages 1315-1321.
    11. Fernholz, Ricardo T., 2016. "A Model of economic mobility and the distribution of wealth," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 168-192.
    12. Moshe Levy & Sorin Solomon, 1996. "Power Laws Are Logarithmic Boltzmann Laws," International Journal of Modern Physics C (IJMPC), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 7(04), pages 595-601.
    13. Chorro, Christophe, 2016. "A simple probabilistic approach of the Yard-Sale model," Statistics & Probability Letters, Elsevier, vol. 112(C), pages 35-40.
    14. James B. McDonald & Michael Ransom, 2008. "The Generalized Beta Distribution as a Model for the Distribution of Income: Estimation of Related Measures of Inequality," Economic Studies in Inequality, Social Exclusion, and Well-Being, in: Duangkamon Chotikapanich (ed.), Modeling Income Distributions and Lorenz Curves, chapter 8, pages 147-166, Springer.
    15. S. Ispolatov & P.L. Krapivsky & S. Redner, 1998. "Wealth distributions in asset exchange models," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 2(2), pages 267-276, March.
    16. Gourieroux, Christian & Jasiak, Joann, 2006. "Multivariate Jacobi process with application to smooth transitions," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 131(1-2), pages 475-505.
    17. Kristian Stegenborg Larsen & Michael Sørensen, 2007. "Diffusion Models For Exchange Rates In A Target Zone," Mathematical Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 17(2), pages 285-306, April.
    18. Christophe Chorro, 2016. "A simple probabilistic approach of the Yard-Sale model," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) hal-01387028, HAL.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Francisco Cardoso, Ben-Hur & Gonçalves, Sebastián & Iglesias, José Roberto, 2023. "Why equal opportunities lead to maximum inequality? The wealth condensation paradox generally solved," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 168(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Nicolas Bouleau & Christophe Chorro, 2017. "The impact of randomness on the distribution of wealth: Some economic aspects of the Wright-Fisher diffusion process," Post-Print hal-01138383, HAL.
    2. Bouleau, Nicolas & Chorro, Christophe, 2017. "The impact of randomness on the distribution of wealth: Some economic aspects of the Wright–Fisher diffusion process," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 479(C), pages 379-395.
    3. Nicolas Bouleau & Christophe Chorro, 2015. "The impact of randomness on the distribution of wealth: Some economic aspects of the Wright-Fisher diffusion process," Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne 15024r, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne, revised Jul 2015.
    4. Nicolas Bouleau & Christophe Chorro, 2015. "The impact of randomness on the distribution of wealth: Some economic aspects of the Wright-Fisher diffusion process," Post-Print halshs-01162452, HAL.
    5. Anirban Chakraborti & Ioane Muni Toke & Marco Patriarca & Frédéric Abergel, 2011. "Econophysics review: II. Agent-based models," Post-Print hal-00621059, HAL.
    6. Chorro, Christophe, 2016. "A simple probabilistic approach of the Yard-Sale model," Statistics & Probability Letters, Elsevier, vol. 112(C), pages 35-40.
    7. Nicolas Bouleau & Christophe Chorro, 2015. "The impact of randomness on the distribution of wealth: Some economic aspects of the Wright-Fisher diffusion process," Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne 15024, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne.
    8. Nicolas Bouleau & Christophe Chorro, 2015. "The impact of randomness on the distribution of wealth: Some economic aspects of the Wright-Fisher diffusion process," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) halshs-01162452, HAL.
    9. Christophe Chorro, 2015. "A Simple Probabilistic Approach of the Yard-Sale Model," Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne 15062, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne.
    10. Christophe Chorro, 2015. "A Simple Probabilistic Approach of the Yard-Sale Model," Post-Print halshs-01222500, HAL.
    11. Christophe Chorro, 2015. "A Simple Probabilistic Approach of the Yard-Sale Model," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) halshs-01222500, HAL.
    12. Smerlak, Matteo, 2016. "Thermodynamics of inequalities: From precariousness to economic stratification," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 441(C), pages 40-50.
    13. Düring, Bertram & Matthes, Daniel & Toscani, Giuseppe, 2008. "A Boltzmann-type approach to the formation of wealth distribution curves," CoFE Discussion Papers 08/05, University of Konstanz, Center of Finance and Econometrics (CoFE).
    14. Patriarca, Marco & Chakraborti, Anirban & Germano, Guido, 2006. "Influence of saving propensity on the power-law tail of the wealth distribution," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 369(2), pages 723-736.
    15. Sam L. Polk & Bruce M. Boghosian, 2020. "The Nonuniversality of Wealth Distribution Tails Near Wealth Condensation Criticality," Papers 2006.15008, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2021.
    16. N. Bagatella-Flores & M. Rodriguez-Achach & H. F. Coronel-Brizio & A. R. Hernandez-Montoya, 2014. "Wealth distribution of simple exchange models coupled with extremal dynamics," Papers 1407.7153, arXiv.org.
    17. Li, Jie & Boghosian, Bruce M., 2018. "Duality in an asset exchange model for wealth distribution," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 497(C), pages 154-165.
    18. Christoph Borgers & Claude Greengard, 2023. "A new probabilistic analysis of the yard-sale model," Papers 2308.01485, arXiv.org.
    19. Li, Jie & Boghosian, Bruce M. & Li, Chengli, 2019. "The Affine Wealth Model: An agent-based model of asset exchange that allows for negative-wealth agents and its empirical validation," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 516(C), pages 423-442.
    20. Boghosian, Bruce M. & Devitt-Lee, Adrian & Johnson, Merek & Li, Jie & Marcq, Jeremy A. & Wang, Hongyan, 2017. "Oligarchy as a phase transition: The effect of wealth-attained advantage in a Fokker–Planck description of asset exchange," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 476(C), pages 15-37.

    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:hal:cesptp:hal-01138383. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    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.