Power law behavior has been recognized to be a pervasive feature of many phenomena in natural and social sciences. While immense research efforts have been devoted to the analysis of behavioral mechanisms responsible for the ubiquity of power-law scaling, the strong theoretical foundation of...

Recently, it has been shown that the power spectrum of extinction intensity during the Phanerozoic takes a power-law form, which, it is suggested, may indicate the presence of critical phenomena in the dynamics underlying the extinction process. In this paper we reproduce these results using the...

Highly optimized tolerance is a model of optimization in engineered systems, which gives rise to power-law distributions of failure events in such systems. The archetypal example is the highly optimized forest fire model. Here we give an analytic solution for this model which explains the origin...

We study size and growth distributions of products and business firms in the context of a given industry. Firm size growth is analyzed in terms of two basic mechanisms, i.e. the increase of the number of new elementary business units and their size growth. We find a power-law relationship...

The currently fashionable theory of self-organisation has its origins in statistical physics. Many believe that the underlying physics model, which is based on inanimate systems, can be employed to explain and predict the emergence of social structures, even of history itself. Some are even...

We provide evidence of a cubic law of art prices that hints to a general pattern for the distribution of artistic talent. The persistence across heterogeneous markets from historical ones to contemporary art auctions of a power law in the distribution of the average price per artist suggests the...

This paper extends the work in Elder and Serletis [Long memory in energy futures prices, Rev. Financial Econ., forthcoming, 2007] and Serletis et al. [Detrended fluctuation analysis of the US stock market, Int. J. Bifurcation Chaos, forthcoming, 2007] by re-examining the empirical evidence for...

It has been shown by Reed that random-sampling a Wiener process x(t) at times T chosen out of an exponential distribution gives rise to power laws in the distribution P(x(T))∼x(T)-β. We show, both theoretically and numerically, that this power-law behaviour also follows by random-sampling...

A simple agent-based model of the evolution of faith-based systems (FBS) in human social networks is presented. In the model, each agent subscribes to a single FBS, and may be converted to share a different agent's FBS during social interactions. FBSs and agents each possess heritable...

A diffuser traversing an infinitely steep ‘potential slide’ might never overcome it. In such cases, the notion of First Passage Time—‘how long would it take till the diffuser surmounts the slide?’—is inadequate. Rather, the notion of relevance is that of Peak Height—‘how high-up...