Since Vilfredo Pareto’s study, the distribution of wealth and income has been the subject of empirical research in the field of finance. A number of researchers in this field have tried to explain the empirical data by using a theoretical and modeling approach. Some results of their researches indicate that the inequality in societies is a universal phenomenon regardless of the era and the region. In this work, we tried to understand the origin of the polarization in societies where polarization is defined as a measure of inequality in the distribution of wealth. For this purpose, we simulated a fictitious stock market by using the Ising spin model proposed by Bornholdt. The result shows that the occurrence of polarization in the market depends on the value of a temperature-like parameter and that a phase transition exists across a critical value of this parameter.

Keywords: Stock market, Ising model, Agent model