Regensburg 2022 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 3: Economic Models

SOE 3.1: Vortrag

Montag, 5. September 2022, 10:15–10:45, H11

Generic catastrophic poverty when selfish investors exploit a degradable common resource — •Claudius Gros — Institute for Theoretical Physics, Goethe University Frankfurt a.M.

The productivity of a common pool of resources may degrade when overly exploited by a number of selfish investors, a situation known as the tragedy of the commons. We examine the case that degradation is functionally dependent on total investments. The payoffs, which are independently optimized by each agent, are given by the balance between the return from investing in the common resource and the investment costs, which are a function of the agent-specific per-unit costs. The payoffs of most agents are shown rigorously not to scale as 1/N, the result for cooperating agents, but as 1/(N*N), where N is the number of agents. This scaling in the stationary state is denoted catastrophic poverty. A finite number of oligarchs may be present in addition, with the payoffs of the oligarchs remaining finite even in the large-N limit. The results hold under very general conditions for a wide class of models.