Zipf's law states that the number of firms with size greater than S is inversely proportional to S. Most explanations start with Gibrat's rule of proportional growth but require additional constraints. We show that Gibrat's rule, at all firm levels, yields Zipf's law under a balance condition between the effective growth rate of incumbent firms (which includes their possible demise) and the growth rate of investments in entrant firms. Remarkably, Zipf's law is the signature of the long-term optimal allocation of resources that ensures the maximum sustainable growth rate of an economy.
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 the violation of Heaps' law in random systems, and obtain alternative growth curves. These curves fulfill universal data collapses that only depend on the value of the Zipf's exponent. We observe that real books behave very much in the same way as random systems, despite the presence of burstiness in word occurrence. We advance an explanation for this unexpe…
The rank-size distribution of cities follows Zipf's law, and the Zipf scaling exponent often tends to a constant 1. This seems to be a general rule. However, a recent numerical experiment shows that there exists a contradiction between the Zipf exponent 1 and high urbanization level in a large population country. In this paper, mathematical modeling, computational analysis, and the method of proof by contradiction are employed to reveal the numerical relationships between urbanization level and Zipf scaling exponent. The main findings are as follows. (1) If Zipf scaling exponent equals 1, the …
The dynamics of discovery and the Heaps-Zipf relationship
CNRS, UMR Géographie-cités & LabCom MIXTAPES（法国国家科学研究中心，地理城市联合研究单位及MIXTAPES实验室合作委员会）；Deezer research & LabCom MIXTAPES（Deezer 研究部门及MIXTAPES实验室合作委员会）；Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, CEA, Institut de Physique Théorique（巴黎萨克雷大学，法国国家科学研究中心，法国原子能和替代能源委员会，理论物理研究所）；Centre d’Analyse et de Mathématique Sociales (CNRS/EHESS)（社会分析与数学中心（法国国家科学研究中心/高等社会科学学院））
The empirical studies of city-size distribution show that Zipf's law and the hierarchical scaling law are linked in many ways. The rank-size scaling and hierarchical scaling seem to be two different sides of the same coin, but their relationship has never been revealed by strict mathematical proof. In this paper, the Zipf's distribution of cities is abstracted as a q-sequence. Based on this sequence, a self-similar hierarchy consisting of many levels is defined and the numbers of cities in different levels form a geometric sequence. An exponential distribution of the average size of cities is …
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 customers using an iterative learning process. Results for the case of restaurants with uniform fitness are reported. When fitness is uniformly distributed, it gives rise to a Zipf law for the number of customers. We perform an exact calculation for the utilization fraction for the case when choices are made independent of fitness. A variant of the model is …
Beyond Zipf's law: Modeling the structure of human language
IFISC (CSIC-UIB) Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos（IFISC（西班牙国家研究委员会-巴利阿里群岛大学）跨学科物理与复杂系统研究所）；Indiana University（印第安纳大学）；ISI Foundation（ISI基金会）
Zipf's law is a hallmark of several complex systems with a modular structure, such as books composed by words or genomes composed by genes. In these component systems, Zipf's law describes the empirical power law distribution of component frequencies. Stochastic processes based on a sample-space-reducing (SSR) mechanism, in which the number of accessible states reduces as the system evolves, have been recently proposed as a simple explanation for the ubiquitous emergence of this law. However, many complex component systems are characterized by other statistical patterns beyond Zipf's law, such…
The law of allometric scaling based on Zipf distributions can be employed to research hierarchies of cities in a geographical region. However, the allometric patterns are easily influenced by random disturbance from the noises in observational data. In theory, both the allometric growth law and Zipf's law are related to the hierarchical scaling laws associated with fractal structure. In this paper, the scaling laws of hierarchies with cascade structure are used to study Chinese cities, and the method of R/S analysis is applied to analyzing the change trend of the allometric scaling exponents. …
The aim here is to address the origins of sustainability for the real growth rate in the United States. For over a century of observations on the real GDP per capita of the United States a sustainable two percent growth rate has been observed. To find an explanation for this observation I consider the impact of utility preferences and the effect of mobility of labor \& capital on every provided measurement. Mobility of labor results in heterogenous rates of increase in prices which is called Baumol's cost disease phenomenon. Heterogeneous rates of inflation then make it impossible to define an…
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 adequately describes the dynamics and distribution of firms' growth. Our theoretical framework is tested against a comprehensive data-base of Spanish firms, which covers to a very large extent Spain's economic activity with a total of 1,155,142 firms evolving along a full decade. We show that the empirical exponent of Pareto's law, a rule often observed in the rank…
