This study uses survey data from India to examine the top percentile of the wealth distribution in India. Using nationally representative samples from two years, 1991 and 2002, a power law tail is found with a Pareto exponent ranging between 1.8 and 2.4. The tail is examined for three specific...

We present a simplified model for the exploitation of resources by interacting agents, in an economy with small-world properties. It is shown that Gaussian distributions of wealth, with some cutoff at a poverty line are present for all values of the parameters, while the frequency of maxima and...

We develop a general framework, based on Boltzmann transport theory, to analyze the distribution of wealth in societies. Within this framework we derive the distribution function of wealth by using a two-party trading model for the poor people, while for the rich people a new model is proposed,...

We present a simplified model for the exploitation of resources by interacting agents, where each agent receives a random fraction of the available resources. An extremal dynamics ensures that the poorest agent has a chance to change its economic welfare. After a long transient; the system...

We investigate the problem of wealth distribution from the viewpoint of asset exchange. Robust nature of Pareto's law across economies, ideologies and nations suggests that this could be an outcome of trading strategies. However, the simple asset exchange models fail to reproduce this feature. A...

We analyze a conservative market model for the competition among economic agents in a society with conserved total wealth. A minimum dynamics ensures that the poorest agent has a chance to improve its economic welfare. After a transient, the system self-organizes into a critical state where the...

We investigate wealth distribution on scale-free networks with different consumption strategies. We indicate that nonlinear consumption function can lead to exponential wealth distribution with a power law tail in accordance with empirical data. In addition, we suggest that anti-degree...

The higher-end tail of the wealth distribution in India is studied using recently published lists of the wealth of richest Indians between the years 2002–2004. The resulting rank distribution seems to imply a power-law tail for the wealth distribution, with a Pareto exponent between 0.81 and...

We study the effect of the social stratification on the wealth distribution on a system of interacting economic agents that are constrained to interact only within their own economic class. The economical mobility of the agents is related to its success in exchange transactions. Different wealth...