Related papers: A universal rank-size law
We define an entropy based on a chosen governing probability distribution. If a certain kind of measurements follow such a distribution it also gives us a suitable scale to study it with. This scale will appear as a link function that is…
It exists a large class of systems for which the traditional notion of extensivity breaks down. From experimental examples we induce two general hypothesis concerning such systems. In the first the existence of an internal coordinate system…
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…
We perform a quantitative analysis of extensive chess databases and show that the frequencies of opening moves are distributed according to a power-law with an exponent that increases linearly with the game depth, whereas the pooled…
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…
Power-law distributions are common, particularly in social physics. Here, we explore whether power-laws might arise as a consequence of a general variational principle for stochastic processes. We describe communities of 'social particles',…
With Zipf's law being originally and most famously observed for word frequency, it is surprisingly limited in its applicability to human language, holding over no more than three to four orders of magnitude before hitting a clear break in…
Distributions following a power-law are an ubiquitous phenomenon. Methods for determining the exponent of a power-law tail by graphical means are often used in practice but are intrinsically unreliable. Maximum likelihood estimators for the…
The distribution of firms' growth and firms' sizes is a topic under intense scrutiny. In this paper we show that a thermodynamic model based on the Maximum Entropy Principle, with dynamical prior information, can be constructed that…
We show that the laws of Zipf and Benford, obeyed by scores of numerical data generated by many and diverse kinds of natural phenomena and human activity are related to the focal expression of a generalized thermodynamic structure. This…
Two power series models are proposed to represent self-similarity and they are compared to the Zipf and Benford distributions. Since evolution of a social network is associated with replicating self-similarity at many levels, the nature of…
The spatial distribution of people exhibits clustering across a wide range of scales, from household ($\sim 10^{-2}$ km) to continental ($\sim 10^4$ km) scales. Empirical data indicates simple power-law scalings for the size distribution of…
Under the unifying umbrella of a general result of Penrose & Yukich [Ann. Appl. Probab., (2003) 13, 277--303] we give laws of large numbers (in the $L^p$ sense) for the total power-weighted length of several nearest-neighbour type graphs on…
A new concept named nonsymmetric entropy which generalizes the concepts of Boltzman's entropy and shannon's entropy, was introduced. Maximal nonsymmetric entropy principle was proven. Some important distribution laws were derived naturally…
We show that there is a common mode of origin for the power laws observed in two different models: (i) the Pareto law for the distribution of money among the agents with random saving propensities in an ideal gas-like market model and (ii)…
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 power law is useful in describing count phenomena such as network degrees and word frequencies. With a single parameter, it captures the main feature that the frequencies are linear on the log-log scale. Nevertheless, there have been…
We analyze the growth statistics of Swedish trade unions and find a universal functional form for the probability distribution of growth rates of union size, and a power law dependence of the standard deviation of this distribution on the…
We develop the argument that the Gibbs-von Neumann entropy is the appropriate statistical mechanical generalisation of the thermodynamic entropy, for macroscopic and microscopic systems, whether in thermal equilibrium or not, as a…
The maximum entropy approach operating with quite general entropy measure and constraint is considered. It is demonstrated that for a conditional or parametrized probability distribution $f(x|\mu)$ there is a "universal" relation among the…