Exchanges in complex networks: income and wealth distributions

Summary. — We investigate the wealth evolution in a system of agents that ex-change wealth through a disordered network in presence of an additive stochastic Gaussian noise. We show that the resulting wealth distribution is shaped by the de-gree distribution of the underlying network and in particular we verify that scale free networks generate distributions with power-law tails in the high-income region. Nu-merical simulations of wealth exchanges performed on two different kind of networks show the inner relation between the wealth distribution and the network properties and confirm the agreement with a self-consistent solution. We show that empirical data for the income distribution in Australia are qualitatively well described by our theoretical predictions. PACS 89.65.Gh – Economics; econophysics, financial markets, business and man-agement. PACS 89.90.+n – Other topics in areas of applied and interdisciplinary physics. 1