Interacting Individuals Leading to Zipf's Law

TL;DR

This paper proposes a general model where pairwise interactions among individuals lead to city size distributions that follow Zipf's law, providing a new explanation for this empirical regularity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel interaction-based framework that explains Zipf's law in city distributions through simple pairwise interactions.

Findings

City size distribution follows Zipf's law under the model

Pairwise interactions among individuals can generate observed city distributions

The approach offers a new perspective on urban growth dynamics

Abstract

We present a general approach to explain the Zipf's law of city distribution. If the simplest interaction (pairwise) is assumed, individuals tend to form cities in agreement with the well-known statistics