Reed WJ "The Pareto, Zipf and other power laws" ECONOMICS LETTERS 74 (1): 15-19 DEC 20 2001

[David G. Post]

Charles
I'm very interested in power law patterns as well -- I took a (very
preliminary) look for power law behavior in legal citations (citations
to prior cases, as opposed to citations in the law review literature) in
David Post and Michael Eisen, How Long is the Coastline of the
Law?  Thoughts on the Fractal Nature of Legal Systems, 29 Journal of
Legal Studies 545 (2000)
URL:  http://www.temple.edu/lawschool/dpost/fractals.pdf

when you write:
>Sociologically, we may be underestimating something like "appeal to
>authority" in our interactions with colleagues, peers, and mentors.

are you referring to the idea that 'rich-get-richer' phenomena produce
power law distributions?
David Post

************************************
David G. Post     Temple University Law School
Postd at erols.com
215-204-4539 or 202-364-5010
http://www.temple.edu/lawschool/dpost/writings.html
http://www.icannwatch.org
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At 02:48 PM 3/20/02 -0500, charles h. davis wrote:
>As usual, I appreciate Gene's selective dissemination of information.
>This particular issue (power curves) has been a concern of mine for some
>time, and I'd like others to comment on it (please).
>
>Specifically, there is a major difference between
>
>         y=ae**bx (exponential)
>
>         and
>
>         y=ax**b (power)
>
>Aside from the mathematics, there may be sociological implications.  When
>Blaise Cronin and I looked at acknowledgements as opposed to citations, we
>found that there was a true power curve -- not a "simple" citation-like
>exponential distribution.
>
>[Davis, Charles H. and Blaise Cronin, "Acknowledgments and Intellectual
>Indebtedness: A Bibliometric Conjecture," Journal of the American Society
>for Information Science 44(10):590-592 (December 1993).]
>
>Sociologically, we may be underestimating something like "appeal to
>authority" in our interactions with colleagues, peers, and mentors.
>
>Cordially,
>
>Charles Davis
>==========================================================
>Senior Fellow, SLIS, Indiana University
>(812) 331-1322  Fax: (812) 855-6166
>http://php.indiana.edu/~davisc/
>==========================================================