Analysis of evolutionary stability of funds flows in financial networks

Recently, there has been much more attention focusing on the evolving networks, whose application domains include Web networks, social networks, communication networks and etc. In this paper, we focus on a financial network, where nodes represent participants of a financial market. Due to lending activities, funds are transferred from one participant to another, and credit-debt relationships between them are formed. With repeated activities, flows of funds are shown in a financial network. We analyze the evolution of funds flows based on evolutionary game theory. Using Lyapunov stability method, we prove that funds flows converge to a relatively stable state, and prove a bound on the convergence time. Finally, we design an ant colony optimization algorithm for a financial network, and use experiments to simulate the evolving process of funds flows.