Variational principle underlying scale invariant social systems

MaxEnt’s variational principle, in conjunction with Shannon’s logarithmic information measure, yields only exponential functional forms in straightforward fashion. In this communication we show how to overcome this limitation via the incorporation, into the variational process, of suitable dynamical information. As a consequence, we are able to formulate a somewhat generalized Shannonian maximum entropy approach which provides a unifying “thermodynamic-like” explanation for the scale-invariant phenomena observed in social contexts, as city-population distributions. We confirm the MaxEnt predictions by means of numerical experiments with random walkers, and compare them with some empirical data.

• Publication year

  2012

• Venue

  European Physical Journal B : Condensed Matter Physics

• Publication date

  2012-04-11

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Physics, Computer Science, Mathematics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1140/epjb/e2012-30313-xarXiv 1204.2420
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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