Related papers: Zipf's law and maximum sustainable growth
We summarize a book under publication with his title written by the three present authors, on the theory of Zipf's law, and more generally of power laws, driven by the mechanism of proportional growth. The preprint is available upon request…
By employing exhaustive lists of large firms in European countries, we show that the upper-tail of the distribution of firm size can be fitted with a power-law (Pareto-Zipf law), and that in this region the growth rate of each firm is…
Zipf's law describes the empirical size distribution of the components of many systems in natural and social sciences and humanities. We show, by solving a statistical model, that Zipf's law co-occurs with the maximization of the diversity…
Zipf's law states that the probability of a variable being larger than $s$ is roughly inversely proportional to $s$. In this paper, we evaluate Zipf's law for the distribution of firm size by the number of employees in Brazil. We use…
Using an exhaustive list of Japanese bankruptcy in 1997, we discover a Zipf law for the distribution of total liabilities of bankrupted firms in high debt range. The life-time of these bankrupted firms has exponential distribution in…
Zipf's law states that if words of language are ranked in the order of decreasing frequency in texts, the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. It is very robust as an experimental observation, but to date it escaped…
Zipf's power law is a general empirical regularity found in many natural and social systems. A recently developed theory predicts that Zipf's law corresponds to systems that are growing according to a maximally sustainable path in the…
The rank-size plots of a large number of different physical and socio-economic systems are usually said to follow Zipf's law, but a unique framework for the comprehension of this ubiquitous scaling law is still lacking. Here we show that a…
Zipf's law, which states that the probability of an observation is inversely proportional to its rank, has been observed in many domains. While there are models that explain Zipf's law in each of them, those explanations are typically…
The rank-size regularity known as Zipf's law is one of scaling laws and frequently observed within the natural living world and in social institutions. Many scientists tried to derive the rank-size scaling relation by entropy-maximizing…
The key idea of this model is that firms are the result of an evolutionary process. Based on demand and supply considerations the evolutionary model presented here derives explicitly Gibrat's law of proportionate effects as the result of…
It is traditionally assumed that Zipf's law implies the power-law growth of the number of different elements with the total number of elements in a system - the so-called Heaps' law. We show that a careful definition of Zipf's law leads to…
We study a resource utilization scenario characterized by intrinsic fitness. To describe the growth and organization of different cities, we consider a model for resource utilization where many restaurants compete, as in a game, to attract…
Two fundamental issues surrounding research on Zipf's law regarding city sizes are whether and why this law holds. This paper does not deal with the latter issue with respect to why, and instead investigates whether Zipf's law holds in a…
We consider a simple model of firm/city/etc. growth based on a multi-item criterion: whenever entity B fares better that entity A on a subset of $M$ items out of $K$, the agent originally in A moves to B. We solve the model analytically in…
Zipf's law is shown to arise as the variational solution of a problem formulated in Fisher's terms. An appropriate minimization process involving Fisher information and scale-invariance yields this universal rank distribution. As an example…
Zipf's law is the most common statistical distribution displaying scaling behavior. Cities, populations or firms are just examples of this seemingly universal law. Although many different models have been proposed, no general theoretical…
Zipf's law states that the frequency of an observation with a given value is inversely proportional to the square of that value; Taylor's law, instead, describes the scaling between fluctuations in the size of a population and its mean.…
It turns out that some empirical facts in Big Data are the effects of properties of large numbers. Zipf's law 'noise' is an example of such an artefact. We expose several properties of the power law distributions and of similar distribution…
Many complex systems are composed of disparate, interacting types of varying sizes: Species abundances in ecosystems, firm sizes in markets, city populations in countries, word counts in language, etc. A longstanding mystery of complex…