Behavioral and network origins of wealth inequality: insights from a virtual world.

ABSTRACT: 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 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 distribution for low wealth levels and a powe

SUBMITTER: Fuchs B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4143195 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature