No Arabic abstract
The rich-get-richer mechanism (agents increase their ``wealth randomly at a rate proportional to their holdings) is often invoked to explain the Pareto power-law distribution observed in many physical situations, such as the degree distribution of growing scale free nets. We use two different analytical approaches, as well as numerical simulations, to study the case where the number of agents is fixed and finite (but large), and the rich-get-richer mechanism is invoked a fraction r of the time (the remainder of the time wealth is disbursed by a homogeneous process). At short times, we recover the Pareto law observed for an unbounded number of agents. In later times, the (moving) distribution can be scaled to reveal a phase transition with a Gaussian asymptotic form for r < 1/2 and a Pareto-like tail (on the positive side) and a novel stretched exponential decay (on the negative side) for r > 1/2.
In our model, $n$ traders interact with each other and with a central bank; they are taxed on the money they make, some of which is dissipated away by corruption. A generic feature of our model is that the richest trader always wins by consuming all the others: another is the existence of a threshold wealth, below which all traders go bankrupt. The two-trader case is examined in detail,in the socialist and capitalist limits, which generalise easily to $n>2$. In its mean-field incarnation, our model exhibits a two-time-scale glassy dynamics, as well as an astonishing universality.When preference is given to local interactions in finite neighbourhoods,a novel feature emerges: instead of at most one overall winner in the system,finite numbers of winners emerge, each one the overlord of a particular region.The patterns formed by such winners (metastable states) are very much a consequence of initial conditions, so that the fate of the marketplace is ruled by its past history; hysteresis is thus also manifested.
The interest in the topological properties of materials brings into question the problem of topological phase transitions. As a control parameter is varied, one may drive a system through phases with different topological properties. What is the nature of these transitions and how can we characterize them? The usual Landau approach, with the concept of an order parameter that is finite in a symmetry broken phase is not useful in this context. Topological transitions do not imply a change of symmetry and there is no obvious order parameter. A crucial observation is that they are associated with a diverging length that allows a scaling approach and to introduce critical exponents which define their universality classes. At zero temperature the critical exponents obey a quantum hyperscaling relation. We study finite size effects at topological transitions and show they exhibit universal behavior due to scaling. We discuss the possibility that they become discontinuous as a consequence of these effects and point out the relevance of our study for real systems.
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the most widely adopted incentive model in current blockchain systems, which unfortunately is energy inefficient. Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is then proposed to tackle the energy issue. The rich-get-richer concern of PoS has been heavily debated in the blockchain community. The debate is centered around the argument that whether rich miners possessing more stakes will obtain higher staking rewards and further increase their potential income in the future. In this paper, we define two types of fairness, i.e., expectational fairness and robust fairness, that are useful for answering this question. In particular, expectational fairness illustrates that the expected income of a miner is proportional to her initial investment, indicating that the expected return on investment is a constant. To better capture the uncertainty of mining outcomes, robust fairness is proposed to characterize whether the return on investment concentrates to a constant with high probability as time evolves. Our analysis shows that the classical PoW mechanism can always preserve both types of fairness as long as the mining game runs for a sufficiently long time. Furthermore, we observe that current PoS blockchains implement various incentive models and discuss three representatives, namely ML-PoS, SL-PoS and C-PoS. We find that (i) ML-PoS (e.g., Qtum and Blackcoin) preserves expectational fairness but may not achieve robust fairness, (ii) SL-PoS (e.g., NXT) does not protect any type of fairness, and (iii) C-PoS (e.g., Ethereum 2.0) outperforms ML-PoS in terms of robust fairness while still maintaining expectational fairness. Finally, massive experiments on real blockchain systems and extensive numerical simulations are performed to validate our analysis.
We have investigated the phase transition in the Heisenberg spin glass using massive numerical simulations to study larger sizes, 48x48x48, than have been attempted before at a spin glass phase transition. A finite-size scaling analysis indicates that the data is compatible with the most economical scenario: a common transition temperature for spins and chiralities.
We investigate the diffusion coefficient of the time integral of the Kuramoto order parameter in globally coupled nonidentical phase oscillators. This coefficient represents the deviation of the time integral of the order parameter from its mean value on the sample average. In other words, this coefficient characterizes long-term fluctuations of the order parameter. For a system of N coupled oscillators, we introduce a statistical quantity D, which denotes the product of N and the diffusion coefficient. We study the scaling law of D with respect to the system size N. In other well-known models such as the Ising model, the scaling property of D is D sim O(1) for both coherent and incoherent regimes except for the transition point. In contrast, in the globally coupled phase oscillators, the scaling law of D is different for the coherent and incoherent regimes: D sim O(1/N^a) with a certain constant a>0 in the coherent regime and D sim O(1) in the incoherent regime. We demonstrate that these scaling laws hold for several representative coupling schemes.