Relationship between the principle of least effort and the average cost of information in a zipfian context

Abdellatif Agouzal, Thierry Lafouge and Marc Bertin

Journal of Informetrics, 2024, vol. 18, issue 1

Abstract: From an informetrics perspective, we discuss the relationship between the Least Effort Principle and information cost minimisation, and discuss the implications for Zipf's law. We propose a mathematical proof of a theorem demonstrating that if one minimises the average cost per unit of information, the Least Effort Principle (LEP) will be verified regardless of the effort function chosen. We then show that Zipf's law can be demonstrated on the basis of the two models studied, namely Average Cost per Unit of Information and the Least Effort Principle (LEP).

Keywords: Informetric; Zipf's law; Shannon; Mandelbrot's law; Principle of least effort; Maximum entropy principle; Entropy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157723001037
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:infome:v:18:y:2024:i:1:s1751157723001037

DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2023.101478

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Informetrics is currently edited by Leo Egghe

More articles in Journal of Informetrics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().