  We discuss the equivalence between kinetic wealth-exchange models, in which
agents exchange wealth during trades, and mechanical models of particles,
exchanging energy during collisions. The universality of the underlying
dynamics is shown both through a variational approach based on the minimization
of the Boltzmann entropy and a complementary microscopic analysis of the
collision dynamics of molecules in a gas. In various relevant cases the
equilibrium distribution is the same for all these models, namely a
gamma-distribution with suitably defined temperature and number of dimensions.
This in turn allows one to quantify the inequalities observed in the wealth
distributions and suggests that their origin should be traced back to very
general underlying mechanisms: for instance, it follows that the smaller the
fraction of the relevant quantity (e.g. wealth or energy) that agents can
exchange during an interaction, the closer the corresponding equilibrium
distribution is to a fair distribution.
