EconoPhysics

To elucidate allometric scaling in complex systems, we investigated the underlying scaling relationships between typical three-scale indicators for approximately 500,000 Japanese firms; namely, annual sales, number of employees, and number of business partners. First, new scaling relations including the distributions of fluctuations were discovered by systematically analyzing conditional statistics. Second, we introduced simple probabilistic models that reproduce all these scaling relations, and we derived relations between scaling exponents and the magnitude of fluctuations.