Wealth redistribution in our small world

We present a simplified model for the exploitation of resources by interacting agents, in an economy with small-world properties. It is shown that Gaussian distributions of wealth, with some cutoff at a poverty line are present for all values of the parameters, while the frequency of maxima and minima strongly depends on the connectivity and the disorder of the lattice. Finally, we compare a system where the commercial links are frozen with an economy where agents can choose their commercial partners at each time step. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.