Effect of money heterogeneity on resource dependency in complex networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how heterogeneity in money distribution affects resource dependency and survivability in complex networks, revealing that moderate heterogeneity benefits scale-free networks.

Contribution

It extends existing resource dependency models by incorporating money, analyzing its impact on network survivability across different degree distributions.

Findings

Heterogeneity in money improves scale-free network survivability.

Homogeneous networks like Erdős-Rényi are unaffected by money heterogeneity.

Moderate initial heterogeneity enhances resource distribution dynamics.

Abstract

Exchange of resources among individual components of a system is fundamental to systems like a social network of humans and a network of cities and villages. For various reasons, the human society has come up with the notion of money as a proxy for the resources. Here we extend the model of resource dependencies in networks that was recently proposed by one of us, by incorporating the concept of money so that the vertices of a network can sell and buy required resources among themselves. We simulate the model using the configuration model as a substrate for homogeneous as well as heterogeneous degree distributions and using various exchange strategies. We show that a moderate amount of initial heterogeneity in the money on the vertices can significantly improve the survivability of Scale-free networks but not that of homogeneous networks like the Erdos-Renyi network. Our work is a step towards understanding the effect of presence of money on the resource distribution dynamics in complex networks.