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Creators/Authors contains: "Cao, Fei"

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  1. Abstract We investigate the unbiased model for money exchanges: agents give at random time a dollar to one another (if they have one). Surprisingly, this dynamics eventually leads to a geometric distribution of wealth (shown empirically by Dragulescu and Yakovenko, and rigorously by several follow-up papers). We prove a uniform-in-time propagation of chaos result as the number of agents goes to infinity, which links the stochastic dynamics to a deterministic infinite system of ordinary differential equations. This deterministic description is then analyzed by taking advantage of several entropy–entropy dissipation inequalities and we provide a quantitative almost-exponential rate of convergence toward the equilibrium (geometric distribution) in relative entropy. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available November 8, 2025
  2. We investigate the uniform reshuffling model for money exchanges: two agents picked uniformly at random redistribute their dollars between them. This stochastic dynamics is of mean-field type and eventually leads to a exponential distribution of wealth. To better understand this dynamics, we investigate its limit as the number of agents goes to infinity. We prove rigorously the so-called propagation of chaos which links the stochastic dynamics to a (limiting) nonlinear partial differential equation (PDE). This deterministic description, which is well-known in the literature, has a flavor of the classical Boltzmann equation arising from statistical mechanics of dilute gases. We prove its convergence toward its exponential equilibrium distribution in the sense of relative entropy. 
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