  The last twenty-five years have seen the development of a significant
literature within the subfield of econophysics which attempts to model economic
inequality as an emergent property of stochastic interactions among ensembles
of agents. In this article, the literature surrounding this approach to the
study of wealth and income distributions, henceforth the "random asset
exchange" literature following the terminology of Sinha (2003), is thoroughly
reviewed for the first time. The foundational papers of Dragulescu and
Yakovenko (2000), Chakraborti and Chakrabarti (2000), and Bouchaud and Mezard
(2000) are discussed in detail, and principal canonical models within the
random asset exchange literature are established. The most common variations
upon these canonical models are enumerated, and significant papers within each
kind of modification are introduced. The successes of such models, as well as
the limitations of their underlying assumptions, are discussed, and it is
argued that the literature should move in the direction of more explicit
representations of economic structure and processes to acquire greater
explanatory power.
