To demonstrate the usefulness of physical approaches for the study of
realistic economic systems, we investigate the inequality of players' wealth in
one of the most extensively studied econophysical models, namely, the minority
game (MG). We gauge the wealth inequality of players in the MG by a well-known
measure in economics known as the modified Gini index. From our numerical
results, we conclude that the wealth inequality in the MG is very severe near
the point of maximum cooperation among players, where the diversity of the
strategy space is approximately equal to the number of strategies at play. In
other words, the optimal cooperation between players comes hand in hand with
severe wealth inequality. We also show that our numerical results in the
asymmetric phase of the MG can be reproduced semi-analytically using a replica
method.Comment: 9 pages in revtex 4 style with 3 figures; minor revision with a
change of title; to appear in PR