Eur. Phys. J. B 73, 69-74 (2010)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2009-00424-8

Experimental evidence for the interplay between individual wealth and transaction network

¹ Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica, 115 Taipei, Taiwan
² Institute of Systems Biology and Bioinformatics, National Central University, 320 Chungli, Taiwan

Corresponding author: gen@phys.sinica.edu.tw

Received: 25 February 2009
Revised: 20 October 2009
Published online: 11 December 2009

Abstract

We conduct a market experiment with human agents in order to explore the structure of transaction networks and to study the dynamics of wealth accumulation. The experiment is carried out on our platform for 97 days with 2,095 effective participants and 16,936 times of transactions. From these data, the hybrid distribution (log-normal bulk and power-law tail) in the wealth is observed and we demonstrate that the transaction networks in our market are always scale-free and disassortative even for those with the size of the order of few hundred. We further discover that the individual wealth is correlated with its degree by a power-law function which allows us to relate the exponent of the transaction network degree distribution to the Pareto index in wealth distribution.