Counterintuitive problem: People in a room keep giving dollars to random others

Re:Counterintuitive problem: People in a room keep giving do... by logicallee on Sunday July 09, 2017 @03:43PM (#14731312)

The article says at the very end:

> This is due to the boundary at zero wealth which, we imagine, people don’t consider when they think about the problem quickly.

So I wanted to see if this is true. (I ran 5000 ticks, 45 people, 45 initial dollars each). I used my own program.

I removed the condition that you must have at least $1 to redistribute it (in other words I allowed negative wealth) and ended up with this distribution:

http://i.imgur.com/SctNJWi.png

vs with the >$0 redistribution condition:

http://i.imgur.com/wRVZxlO.png

While it affects the shape, it is far from the case that it looks like some brownian motion near the starting wealth. When sorted, it still has a basically unequally distributed shape.

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Re:Counterintuitive problem: People in a room keep giving do... by jdmichal on Monday July 10, 2017 @01:15PM (#14737823)

There's two asymmetries going on. The first is the one you played with, which is zero hard boundary. But there's also the asymmetry of losing zero to one dollars every round, while gaining zero to n-1 dollars every round. I bet you can minimize the skew by applying a progressive rate to how much is given away, such that you can also lose zero to n-1 dollars every round.

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