Power law distribution of wealth in population based on a modified Equíluz-Zimmermann model

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2005 Apr;71(4 Pt 2):046135. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.71.046135. Epub 2005 Apr 22.

Abstract

We propose a money-based model for the power law distribution (PLD) of wealth in an economically interacting population. It is introduced as a modification of the Equíluz and Zimmermann (EZ) model for crowding and information transmission in financial markets. Still, it must be stressed that in the EZ model a PLD without exponential correction is obtained only for a particular parameter, while our pattern will give the exact PLD within a wide range. The PLD exponent depends on the model parameters in a non-trivial way and is exactly calculated in this paper. The numerical results are in excellent agreement with the analytic prediction, and also comparable with empirical data of wealth distribution.