Luís A. Nunes Amaral

co-Director, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems
Professor of Chemical & Biological Engineering
Professor of Physics & Astronomy (by courtesy)
Professor of Medicine (by courtesy)

Chemical & Biological Engineering
2145 Sheridan Road (Room E136)
Evanston, IL 60208, US
Phone: (847) 491-7850

Power law scaling for a system of interacting units with complex internal structure

Amaral LAN, Buldyrev SV, Havlin S, Salinger MA, Stanley HE
Physical Review Letters 80, 1385-1388 (1998)
Times cited: 148

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a system composed of interacting units each with a complex internal structure comprising many subunits and treat the case in which each subunit grows in a multiplicative manner. We propose a model for such systems in which the interaction among the units is treated in a mean field approximation and the interaction among subunits is nonlinear. We test the model and find agreement between our predictions and empirical results based on a large economics database spanning 20 years.