The workings of the Maximum Entropy Principle in collective human behavior

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that the Maximum Entropy principle effectively models city-population rank distributions in Spanish provinces, revealing that population-growth dynamics are key to understanding these distributions.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence linking population-growth dynamics to the MaxEnt principle in explaining city-size distributions.

Findings

MaxEnt accurately models city-population rank distributions.

Population-growth dynamics are the main driver of observed distributions.

Study covers 50 provinces over 15 years with over 8000 cities.

Abstract

We exhibit compelling evidence regarding how well does the MaxEnt principle describe the rank-distribution of city-populations via an exhaustive study of the 50 Spanish provinces (more than 8000 cities) in a time-window of 15 years (1996-2010). We show that the dynamics that governs the population-growth is the deciding factor that originates the observed distributions. The connection between dynamics and distributions is unravelled via MaxEnt.