IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/cesptp/halshs-01162452.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, in particular, we underscore that randomness plays a key role in concentrating the wealth to the extreme with a single player. 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. We show that taxation of income is not sufficient to overcome the externe concentration process contrary to a uniform taxation of capital that stabilizes the economy preventing agents to be ruined.

Suggested Citation

  • 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.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:cesptp:halshs-01162452
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01162452v2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01162452v2/document
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    4. 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.
    5. 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.
    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. 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.
    2. Christophe Chorro, 2015. "A Simple Probabilistic Approach of the Yard-Sale Model," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) halshs-01222500, HAL.
    3. Chorro, Christophe, 2016. "A simple probabilistic approach of the Yard-Sale model," Statistics & Probability Letters, Elsevier, vol. 112(C), pages 35-40.
    4. Christophe Chorro, 2015. "A Simple Probabilistic Approach of the Yard-Sale Model," Post-Print halshs-01222500, HAL.

    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," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) hal-01138383, HAL.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    4. 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.
    5. 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.
    6. 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.
    7. Jiong Liu & R. A. Serota, 2023. "Rethinking Generalized Beta family of distributions," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 96(2), pages 1-14, February.
    8. Dashti Moghaddam, M. & Mills, Jeffrey & Serota, R.A., 2020. "From a stochastic model of economic exchange to measures of inequality," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 559(C).
    9. Jiong Liu & R. A. Serota, 2022. "Rethinking Generalized Beta Family of Distributions," Papers 2209.05225, arXiv.org.
    10. Tam'as S. Bir'o & Zolt'an N'eda, 2020. "Gintropy: Gini index based generalization of Entropy," Papers 2007.04829, arXiv.org.
    11. Stojkoski, Viktor & Karbevski, Marko & Utkovski, Zoran & Basnarkov, Lasko & Kocarev, Ljupco, 2021. "Evolution of cooperation in networked heterogeneous fluctuating environments," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 572(C).
    12. Venkatasubramanian, Venkat & Luo, Yu & Sethuraman, Jay, 2015. "How much inequality in income is fair? A microeconomic game theoretic perspective," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 435(C), pages 120-138.
    13. E. Samanidou & E. Zschischang & D. Stauffer & T. Lux, 2001. "Microscopic Models of Financial Markets," Papers cond-mat/0110354, arXiv.org.
    14. Kočišová, J. & Horváth, D. & Brutovský, B., 2009. "The efficiency of individual optimization in the conditions of competitive growth," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 388(17), pages 3585-3592.
    15. Hajargasht, Gholamreza & Griffiths, William E., 2013. "Pareto–lognormal distributions: Inequality, poverty, and estimation from grouped income data," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 33(C), pages 593-604.
    16. Vladimir Hlasny, 2021. "Parametric representation of the top of income distributions: Options, historical evidence, and model selection," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(4), pages 1217-1256, September.
    17. Bertram During & Nicos Georgiou & Enrico Scalas, 2016. "A stylized model for wealth distribution," Papers 1609.08978, arXiv.org, revised Jul 2021.
    18. Michał Brzeziński, 2013. "Parametric Modelling of Income Distribution in Central and Eastern Europe," Central European Journal of Economic Modelling and Econometrics, Central European Journal of Economic Modelling and Econometrics, vol. 5(3), pages 207-230, September.
    19. Yougui Wang & Ning Ding, 2005. "Dynamic Process of Money Transfer Models," Papers physics/0507162, arXiv.org.
    20. Tamotsu Onozaki, 2018. "Nonlinearity, Bounded Rationality, and Heterogeneity," Springer Books, Springer, number 978-4-431-54971-0, June.

    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:halshs-01162452. 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.