Heavy-Tailed Probability Distributions: Some Examples of Their Appearance

Abstract

We provide two examples of the appearance of heavy-tailed distributions in social sciences applications. Among these distributions are the laws of Pareto and Lotka and some new ones.

The examples are illustrated through the construction of suitable toy models.

Keywords

• heavy-tailed distributions
• Pareto's law
• Lotka's law
• Zipf's law
• probability-generating function