The principle of social scaling
type: Item
instance of: scholarly article
title: The principle of social scaling
zbMATH Open document ID: 1380.91104
DOI: 10.1155/2017/8358909
author: Paulo L. Dos Santos
published in: Complexity
publication date: 2018-01-31T00:00:00Z
review text: Summary: This paper identifies a general class of economic processes capable of generating the first-moment constraints implicit in the observed cross-sectional distributions of a number of economic variables: processes of \textit{social scaling}. Across a variety of settings, the outcomes of economic competition reflect the normalization of individual values of certain economic quantities by average or social measures of themselves. The resulting socioreferential processes establish systematic interdependences among individual values of important economic variables, which under certain conditions take the form of emergent first-moment constraints on their distributions. The paper postulates a principle describing this systemic regulation of \textit{socially scaled} variables and illustrates its empirical purchase by showing how capital- and labor-market competition can give rise to patterns of social scaling that help account for the observed distributions of Tobin's \(q\) and wage income. The paper's discussion embodies a distinctive approach to understanding and investigating empirically the relationship between individual agency and structural determinations in complex economic systems and motivates the development of observational foundations for aggregative, macrolevel economic analysis.
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 91B64
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 93E03
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 93B07
zbMATH DE Number: 6833058
zbMATH Keywords: economic processes
zbMATH Keywords: first-moment constraints
zbMATH Keywords: observed cross-sectional distributions
zbMATH Keywords: observation
zbMATH Keywords: aggregative, macrolevel economic analysis
zbMATH Keywords: social scaling
MaRDI profile type: Publication
full work available at URL: https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/8358909
OpenAlex ID: W2565974040
cites work: Introduction to Econophysics
cites work: Price fluctuations and market activity
cites work: Dynamics of Markets
cites work: Race, gender and the econophysics of income distribution in the USA
cites work: Why are distributions of firm growth rates tent-shaped?
cites work: A Statistical Equilibrium Approach to the Distribution of Profit Rates
cites work: Asymmetric Laplace laws and modeling financial data
cites work: Probability Theory
cites work: A statistical equilibrium theory of markets
cites work: Q2723273
description: scientific article; zbMATH DE number 6833058