《Behavioral and Network Origins of Wealth Inequality: Insights from a
Virtual World》
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作者:
Benedikt Fuchs and Stefan Thurner
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最新提交年份:
2014
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英文摘要:
Almost universally, wealth is not distributed uniformly within societies or economies. Even though wealth data have been collected in various forms for centuries, the origins for the observed wealth-disparity and social inequality are not yet fully understood. Especially the impact and connections of human behavior on wealth could so far not be inferred from data. Here we study wealth data from the virtual economy of the massive multiplayer online game (MMOG) Pardus. This data not only contains every player\'s wealth at every point in time, but also all actions of every player over a timespan of almost a decade. We find that wealth distributions in the virtual world are very similar to those in western countries. In particular we find an approximate exponential for low wealth and a power-law tail. The Gini index is found to be $g=0.65$, which is close to the indices of many Western countries. We find that wealth-increase rates depend on the time when players entered the game. Players that entered the game early on tend to have remarkably higher wealth-increase rates than those who joined later. Studying the players\' positions within their social networks, we find that the local position in the trade network is most relevant for wealth. Wealthy people have high in- and out-degree in the trade network, relatively low nearest-neighbor degree and a low clustering coefficient. Wealthy players have many mutual friendships and are socially well respected by others, but spend more time on business than on socializing. We find that players that are not organized within social groups with at least three members are significantly poorer on average. We observe that high `political\' status and high wealth go hand in hand. Wealthy players have few personal enemies, but show animosity towards players that behave as public enemies.
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中文摘要:
几乎所有人都认为,财富在社会或经济中的分配并不均匀。尽管财富数据已经以各种形式收集了几个世纪,但人们尚未完全理解观察到的贫富差距和社会不平等的根源。尤其是人类行为对财富的影响和联系,目前还无法从数据中推断出来。在这里,我们研究了大型多人在线游戏(MMOG)Pardus虚拟经济中的财富数据。这些数据不仅包含每个玩家在每个时间点的财富,还包含每个玩家在近十年的时间跨度内的所有行为。我们发现虚拟世界中的财富分布与西方国家非常相似。特别是,我们发现了低财富的近似指数和幂律尾。基尼指数为$g=0.65$,接近许多西方国家的指数。我们发现财富增长率取决于玩家进入游戏的时间。早期加入游戏的玩家往往比后来加入的玩家财富增长率更高。研究参与者在社交网络中的位置,我们发现,交易网络中的本地位置与财富最相关。富人在交易网络中的进出度较高,最近邻度相对较低,聚集系数较低。富有的玩家有很多共同的友谊,在社交上受到他人的尊重,但他们在商业上的时间比社交上的时间要多。我们发现,在至少有三名成员的社会团体中没有组织的玩家平均来说要穷得多。我们观察到,高“政治”地位和高财富是齐头并进的。富有的玩家几乎没有个人敌人,但对表现为公敌的玩家表现出敌意。
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分类信息:
一级分类:Physics 物理学
二级分类:Physics and Society 物理学与社会
分类描述:Structure, dynamics and collective behavior of societies and groups (human or otherwise). Quantitative analysis of social networks and other complex networks. Physics and engineering of infrastructure and systems of broad societal impact (e.g., energy grids, transportation networks).
社会和团体(人类或其他)的结构、动态和集体行为。社会网络和其他复杂网络的定量分析。具有广泛社会影响的基础设施和系统(如能源网、运输网络)的物理和工程。
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一级分类:Quantitative Finance 数量金融学
二级分类:General Finance 一般财务
分类描述:Development of general quantitative methodologies with applications in finance
通用定量方法的发展及其在金融中的应用
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