Abstract
Individual and national wealth accumulation is here modelled as a recurrently played game between randomly matched pairs of individuals from a large population. The simple game here studied represents exogenously and spontaneously arising productive opportunities, and the drawn individuals may seek cooperation or conflict over each opportunity. How does national wealth and the evolutionarily stable propensity to cooperate depend on the natural and institutional environment? We show that the steady-state level of national wealth is not monotonically increasing in the richness of the environment. We also study the evolution of the full wealth distribution. When the population is large, the distribution of individual wealth converges over time to a sqewed distribution that is well approximated by a Weibull distribution.