Inequality and Growth: A Two-Player Dynamic Game with Production and Appropriation

This paper models a two-agent economy with production and appropriation as a noncooperative dynamic game, and determines its closed-form Markovian Nash equilibrium. The analysis highlights the para-metric conditions that tip the economy from a nonaggressive or “co-operative” equilibrium to outright distributional conflict. The model includes parameters that capture the role of appropriation technology and destructiveness. The full dynamic implications of the game are yet to be explored, but the model offers a promising general framework for thinking about different technological and economic conditions as more or less conducive to cooperation or distributional conflict.