Relations Among Different Inequality Measures in Complex Systems: From Kinetic Exchange to Earthquake Models

TL;DR

This study explores the relationships among various inequality measures across economic and geophysical models, revealing universal behaviors and critical points that suggest underlying commonalities in complex systems.

Contribution

It demonstrates that inequality indices behave similarly across diverse models, linking economic wealth exchange and earthquake dynamics through numerical analysis of Lorenz functions and inequality measures.

Findings

Gini and Kolkata indices converge near 0.86 at criticality

P/(2k-1) remains slightly above unity across models

Inequality measures reveal universal features in complex systems

Abstract

We present a numerical study of several inequality measures across two kinetic wealth exchange models with extreme inequality features (namely the Banerjee model, and the Chakraborti or Yard Sale model) and two earthquake simulating models (namely the Chakrabarti Stinchcombe two fractal overlap model and the nonlinear dynamical Burridge Knopoff model). For each model we compute numerically the Lorenz function for the respective models wealth, overlap magnitude or avalanche distributions. We then estimate the variations of Gini (g), Pietra (p) and Kolkata (k) indices in these models with systematic variations of saving propensity (for the two wealth exchange models), with systematic variations of generation or block numbers (for the two earthquake simulating models). We find that for appropriate values of the respective model parameters, the inequality indices g and k in corresponding the distributions (of wealth or avalanche) show quantitatively similar behavior, namely g equal to k nearly equal to 0.86, which was identified earlier to correspond to the precursor point of criticality in self organized critical models (k equal to 0.80 corresponds to that for Pareto 80/20 law). The values of p/(2k-1) in all these (wealth exchange and earthquake) models remain a little above unity, as was predicted theoretically. These observations for the inequality indices g, k and p across the socio economic and geophysical models indicate the presence of unifying subtle features in the statistics of such disparate dynamical systems.