Token as Power: How Token Resources Shape Agent Economies ?

In evolving multi-agent economies, task performance governs economic rewards, evolutionary survival, and reproduction. However, whether intrinsic model capability guarantees competitive dominance under asymmetric resource constraints remains an open question. Motivated by debate experiments where a compute-advantaged weaker model defending an incorrect claim wins $83\%$ of debates at matched monetary cost, we systematically investigate token allocation within the Economy of Minds (EOM) framework across two scientific-reasoning benchmarks. We examine three regime types: persistent resource inequality, temporary budget shocks, and wealth-funded token expansion. Our investigation reveals three core dynamics. First, resource-advantaged weaker models can displace models that perform better under matched budgets, a phenomenon we term the Agentic Gresham-like Effect, even when stronger models retain a static capability advantage. Second, temporary budget shocks cause amplified losses under economic evolution compared to static populations, leaving performance gaps and changes in population and wealth after budget restoration. Third, early token investment can support subsequent lineage expansion: restricting purchases by selected agents reduces their lineages' final population shares in paired comparisons. Together, these findings establish token access as a structural driver of population dynamics rather than a passive runtime hyperparameter. Consequently, evaluating agent economies requires reporting resource distributions alongside task performance and lineage trajectories.