Heavy-tailed probability distributions in social sciences

TL;DR

This paper reviews the occurrence of heavy-tailed distributions like Pareto, Lotka, and Zipf in natural sciences, exploring their causes through toy models and discussing their implications.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of heavy-tailed distributions in social sciences, including new variants and illustrative models.

Findings

Heavy-tailed distributions are common in natural sciences.

Toy models help explain the origins of these distributions.

The paper discusses various laws like Pareto, Lotka, and Zipf.

Abstract

We present an overview of possible reasons for the appearance of heavy-tailed distributions in applications to the natural sciences. These distributions include the laws of Pareto, Lotka, and some new ones. The reasons are illustrated using suitable toy models. Keywords: heavy-tailed distributions; Pareto law; Lotka law; Zipf law; probability generating function.