Pareto Law in a Kinetic Model of Market with Random Saving Propensity

Arnab Chatterjee, Bikas K. Chakrabarti, S. S. Manna

Published 2003-01-16, updated 2004-01-27Version 3

We have numerically simulated the ideal-gas models of trading markets, where each agent is identified with a gas molecule and each trading as an elastic or money-conserving two-body collision. Unlike in the ideal gas, we introduce (quenched) saving propensity of the agents, distributed widely between the agents ($0 \le \lambda < 1$). The system remarkably self-organizes to a critical Pareto distribution of money $P(m) \sim m^{-(\nu + 1)}$ with $\nu \simeq 1$. We analyse the robustness (universality) of the distribution in the model. We also argue that although the fractional saving ingredient is a bit unnatural one in the context of gas models, our model is the simplest so far, showing self-organized criticality, and combines two century-old distributions: Gibbs (1901) and Pareto (1897) distributions.