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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf's_law

• dsacco 9y ago
  To expand on this comment, since it's just a (albeit helpful) link: the author's point is that competitive advantage follows a power law. When phenomena appear to obey a power law, the specific percentage increase does not need to particularly rigorous to illustrate the growth pattern. You could plot the two axes without numbers and it still basically makes sense. You're going to see a disproportionately weighted side and a long tail next to it. That doesn't mean the author is necessarily correct in the overall observation here, or that you shouldn't add further rigor to the analysis; it just means that for the purposes of an article without peer review, "1%" is probably fine. Power laws are very often fuzzy when they're applied (or perhaps rather, "observed") in practice.