CSS SEMINAR – SEPTEMBER 11 – AXTELL

Friday, 11th September: 3.00pm

A Relationship Between Growth and Size

Rob Axtell, Department of Computational Social Science

Rob will present a relationship between growth rates and sizes of subgroups in heterogeneous populations. Skew size distributions are shown to require heavy-tailed growth rates for stability. Alternatively, heavy-tailed growth processes induce skew sizes. Applications to firms, mutual funds, and bird populations have been investigated. Some abstract computational examples will be presented. The relationship of these new results to the related Gibrat and Kesten processes will be explored.