Analytical treatment of kinetic exchange models

Kinetic exchange models are very simple and powerful tool to understand the processes in the ideal gasses. These simple models enabled Boltzmann to formulate the principles of statistical physics [1, 2]. In previous text we already talked about some of the simplest models, but we did not write about a very important topic - their analytical treatment. It appears that analytical treatment is one of the most serious drawbacks of these models - in certain cases the equations become very complex or even analytically unsolvable. While, our usual approach, one-step processes (previously discussed on Physics of Risk from the point of view of the Kirman model) can be treated analytically with ease in most of the cases [3, 4]. In this text we will discuss two main techniques used to analytically obtain statistical features of the kinetic exchange models.

"Pinigų karta": Interview with laureate of Nobel prize in economics Robert Shiller

Few weeks ago Robert J. Shiller, laureate of Nobel prize in economics, was in Lithuania and even gave an open lecture at ISM ("openness" is rather doubtful in this case, because ordinary mortals were unable to attend). The good thing was that the lecture was broadcasted over the internet. Another good thing was that creators of "Pinigų karta" (one of the more serious TV shows about money and economics in Lithuania) invited this famous person for a brief interview and he accepted. We invite you to watch it (don't be discouraged - only first few seconds are in Lithuanian!).

A. Kononovicius: Socialism and capitalism in the kinetic exchange models

Worldwide and in Lithuania, due to historical context, there is one very popular topic for the economic-based discussion. It is based on the standard political conflict between the "right" and "left" - capitalism vs socialism. This ideological debate might be rather interesting, but it is not quite clear who is right and who is wrong. It would rather interesting to see if and how these general ideas work. In my opinion these generalized ideas might be easily introduced into some simple agent-based models. Previously considered kinetic exchange models appear to be one of the best candidates for the job. Thus in this text I will discuss the implementation of the simplistic sketches of these economic ideologies into the kinetic exchange models.

Nick Hanauer on who actually creates jobs

In the widely accessible media, at least in Lithuania, one can observe many discussions on the progressive tax and increasing taxation of business. Quite frequently during these discussions one can hear one very interesting argument - the rich and business create jobs. This means that the rich and business create a public good, thus being socially responsible. Thus demanding and increasing social responsibility is unjust and indecent!

Nick Hanauer's talk reminds us one of the most elementary lessons from the Economics 101 - without sufficient demand (consumers) there is no motivation to create more supply (utility). Only if the demand is increasing, only then the business has two choices - to increase the production (create new jobs) or to increase the price of the utility. If one increases supply without proper reasoning, then that one will almost surely suffer losses.

Modeling wealth distribution using kinetic exchange models

We have previously wrote about the elementary kinetic models. Now we would like to put them to a certain use - namely we would like to model wealth distributions. The problem is that the stationary distribution of the elementary kinetic models, as we have shown before, is Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution, while the empirical distribution of wealth has a power law tail (see Fig. 1). Therefore we will need some essential modifications to replicate the empirical distribution.