3 ms·

One thing about Power Law distributions -- they work really great except at the outliers (ie, top 10). You can't always say that because incumbent #10 is x, #1

• diziet 13y ago
  I just wanted to present a counter argument to my reasoning: What if the list of companies (which is publicly traded companies) is missing the real head -- the non public companies that are either government owned or are governments themselves? If we look at the list of companies by revenue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r... it does look like the real head of the Power Law distribution is missing.
  • arethuza 13y ago
    The original paper seems to take the Global 2000 and then re-orders them by asset size, not revenue: "we find that financial firms dominate the top tail of the firm distribution by asset size" http://arxiv.org/pdf/1309.2130v2.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1309.2130v2.pdf
• pcrh 13y ago
  Intuitively one would expect that there are reasons why companies cannot be larger than a certain size (to exaggerate, none can be larger than the global economy). As companies approach their theoretical maximum, one would expect the distribution to deviate from the power law, as the actual data in the article demonstrates.
• cperciva 13y ago
  Clearly there must be a Shadow Corporate System and Apple is hiding close to $2T in it.