Condensed Matter Physics Seminar
Thursday, September 23, 1999, 2 p.m.
Plant Sciences Building, Room 1130
Statistical Mechanics of Money
Victor Yakovenko
(University of Maryland)
Abstract: A network of agents exchanging money between
themselves is studied in order to simulate an economic environment.
In agreement with general laws of statistical mechanics, if the total amount
of money is conserved during each transaction and if the number of agents
is held constant, the stationary distribution of money among agents is
the Gibbs distribution exp(-M/T). Here M is the money,
and T is an effective "temperature'', which is essentially the average
amount of money per agent. As follows from the Boltzmann-equation
approach to the problem, deviations from this general result occur only
when the time-reversal symmetry of the trading rules is explicitly broken.
The emergence of the Gibbs distribution is verified in computer simulations
of various trading rules and models.
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