Laws of Large Numbers for Dynamical Systems with Randomly Matched Individuals

Abstract

Biologists and economists have analyzed populations where each individual interacts with randomly selected individuals. The random matching generates a very complicated stochastic system. Consequently biologists and economists have approximated such a system with a deterministic system. The justitication for such an approximation is that the population is assumed to be very large and thus some law of large numbers must hold. This paper gives a characterization of random matching schemes for countably infinite populations. In particular this paper shows that there exists a random matching scheme such that the stochastic system and the deterministic system are the same. Finally, we show that if the process lasts finitely many periods and if the population is large enough then the deterministic model offers a good approximation of the stochastic model. In doing so we make precise what we mean by population, matching process, and evolution of the population.