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arXiv · 2201.11456

Power Laws, the Price Model, and the Pareto type-2 Distribution

Grzegorz Siudem·Przemysław Nowak·Marek Gagolewski
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Abstract

We consider a version of D. Price's model for the growth of a bibliographic network, where in each iteration a constant number of citations is randomly allocated according to a weighted combination of accidental (uniformly distributed) and preferential (rich-get-richer) rules. Instead of relying on the typical master equation approach, we formulate and solve this problem in terms of the rank-size distribution. We show that, asymptotically, such a process leads to a Pareto-type 2 distribution with an appealingly interpretable parametrisation. We prove that the solution to the Price model expressed in terms of the rank-size distribution coincides with the expected values of order statistics in an independent Paretian sample. We study the bias and the mean squared error of three well-behaving estimators of the underlying model parameters. An empirical analysis of a large repository of academic papers yields a good fit not only in the tail of the distribution (as it is usually the case in the power law-like framework), but also across the whole domain. Interestingly, the estimated models indicate higher degree of preferentially attached citations and smaller share of randomness than previous studies.

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Grzegorz Siudem, Przemysław Nowak, Marek Gagolewski. 2022-01-27. Power Laws, the Price Model, and the Pareto type-2 Distribution. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2022.128059

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