Allelomimesis as a generic clustering mechanism for interacting agents

Dranreb Earl Juanico, Christopher Monterola and Caesar Saloma

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2003, vol. 320, issue C, 590-600

Abstract: We show that allelomimesis is a generic mechanism that could explain why the cluster-size distribution D(s) of diverse social aggregates such as animal groups and socio-economic entities all fit into a power-law distribution: D(s)∝s−τ, where τ is the critical exponent. Roughly, allelomimesis is the tendency of an agent to imitate the actions of its neighbors. A cellular automata model of allelomimesis yields a population-age distribution which is consistent with the assumption of evolutionary biologists that isolation does not enhance the life expectancies of agents. Dependence of τ with degree of allelomimesis is highly nonlinear. The different experimental τ values yielded by the size distributions of real systems such as fish schools, African buffalo herds, US financial firms, and towns around London and Berlin, might be understood as arising from the varying degrees of allelomimesis by system constituents.

Keywords: Clustering; Aggregation; Scaling; Complex systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037843710201556X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

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:phsmap:v:320:y:2003:i:c:p:590-600

DOI: 10.1016/S0378-4371(02)01556-X

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().