2008/02/13 by Hari M. Gupta, José R. Campanha, Jose R. Campanha +2
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Physics and Astronomy · #Complex Systems and Time Series Analysis #Financial Risk and Volatility Modeling #Statistical Mechanics and Entropy #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.physa.2008.09.009
22 pages, 8 figures
arxiv created 2008/02/13 · openalex publication_date 2008/09/17 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Power law scaling is observed in many physical, biological and socio-economical complex systems and is now considered as an important property of these systems. In general, power law exists in the central part of the distribution. It has deviations from power law for very small and very large step sizes. Tsallis, through non-extensive thermodynamics, explained power law distribution in many cases including deviation from the power law, both for small and very large steps. In case of very large steps, they used heuristic crossover approach. In real systems, the size is limited and thus, the size limiting factor is important. In the present work, we present an alternative model in which we consider that the entropy factor q decreases with step size due to the softening of long range interactions or memory. This explains the deviation of power law for very large step sizes. Finally, we apply this model for distribution of citation index of scientists and examination scores and are able to explain the entire distribution including deviations from power law.