6 papers
Local wealth condensation for yard-sale models with wealth-dependent biases
Christoph Börgers, Claude Greengard
In Chakraborti's yard-sale model of an economy, identical agents engage in pairwise trades, resulting in wealth exchanges that conserve each agent's expected wealth. Doob's marting…
Variations on the two-child problem
Christoph Börgers, Samer Nour Eddine
Mr. Smith has two children. Given that at least one of them is a boy, how likely is it that Mr. Smith has two boys? It's a very standard puzzle in elementary books on probability t…
ODE models of wealth concentration and taxation
Bruce Boghosian, Christoph Börgers
We refer to an individual holding a non-negligible fraction of the country's total wealth as an oligarch. We explain how a model due to Boghosian et al. can be used to explore the…
A new probabilistic analysis of the yard-sale model
Christoph Börgers, Claude Greengard
In Chakraborti's yard-sale model of an economy, identical agents engage in trades that result in wealth exchanges, but conserve the combined wealth of all agents and each agent's e…
ODEs and Mandatory Voting
Christoph Börgers, Natasa Dragovic, Anna Haensch +2
This paper presents mathematics relevant to the question whether voting should be mandatory. Assuming a static distribution of voters' political beliefs, we model how politicians m…
Hanging cables and spider threads
Christoph Börgers
It has been known for more than 300 years that the shape of an inelastic hanging cable, chain, or rope of uniform linear mass density is the graph of the hyperbolic cosine, up to s…