This paper discusses the size distribution–in economic terms–of the Italian municipalities over the period 2007–2011. Yearly data are rather well fitted by a modified Lavalette law, while Zipf–Mandelbrot–Pareto law seems to fail in this doing. The analysis is performed either at a...

This paper investigates the issue of whether or not the top world wealth distribution is Paretian in nature. To this end, Forbes’ data on the net worth of the world’s billionaires for each of the ten years from 2000 to 2009 is used. The results of the Kolmogorov–Smirnov (KS),...

To elucidate allometric scaling in complex systems, we investigated the underlying scaling relationships between typical three-scale indicators for approximately 500,000 Japanese firms; namely, annual sales, number of employees, and number of business partners. First, new scaling relations...

In this paper, the distribution and inequality of firm sizes is evaluated for the Korean firms listed on the stock markets. Using the amount of sales, total assets, capital, and the number of employees, respectively, as a proxy for firm sizes, we find that the upper tail of the Korean firm size...

We study a simple model of market share dynamics with boundedly rational consumers and firms interacting with each other. As the number of consumers is large, we employ a statistical description to represent firms’ distribution of consumer share, which is characterized by a single parameter...

By analyzing the data of top 500 Chinese firms from the year 2002 to 2007, we reveal that their revenues and ranks obey the Zipf’s law with exponent of 1 for each year. This result confirms the universality of firm size character which has been presented in many other empirical works, since...

The rank-size regularity known as Zipf’s law is one of the scaling laws and is frequently observed in the natural living world and social institutions. Many scientists have tried to derive the rank-size scaling relation through entropy-maximizing methods, but they have not been entirely...

We define the syllable-to-character mapping spectrum in Chinese as the normalized number of characters per syllable ranked from high to low. This spectrum provides a statistical characterization of the relationship between spoken and written Chinese. We have shown that two functions, the...

Zipf’s law can be used to describe the rank-size distribution of cities in a region. It has seldom been employed to research urban internal structure. In this paper, we demonstrate that the space-filling process within a city follows Zipf’s law and can be characterized with the rank-size...

We present a statistical model for the distribution of Chinese names. Both family names and given names are studied on the same basis. With naive expectation, the distribution of family names can be very different from that of given names. One is affected mostly by genealogy, while the other can...