Power law scaling for a system of interacting units with complex internal structure

Amaral LAN, Buldyrev SV, Havlin S, Salinger MA, Stanley HE
Physical Review Letters 80,  1385 - 1388 (1998)
Times cited: 148
PDF

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a system composed of interacting units each with a complex internal structure comprising many subunits and treat the case in which each subunit grows in a multiplicative manner. We propose a model for such systems in which the interaction among the units is treated in a mean field approximation and the interaction among subunits is nonlinear. We test the model and find agreement between our predictions and empirical results based on a large economics database spanning 20 years.