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The firm as a bundle of barcodes

  • Focus Section on Applications of Physics in Financial Analysis
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Abstract

We empirically investigate the firm growth model proposed by Buldyrev et al. by using a unique dataset that contains the daily sales of more than 200 thousand products, which are collected from about 200 supermarkets in Japan over the last 20 years. We find that the empirical firm growth distribution is characterized by a Laplace distribution at the center and power-law at the tails, as predicted by the model. However, some of these characteristics disappear once we randomly reshuffle products across firms, implying that the shape of the empirical distribution is not produced as described by the model. Our simulation results suggest that the shape of the empirical distribution stems mainly from the presence of relationship between the size of a product and its growth rate.

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Author notes

  1. K. Sakai

    Present address: Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, Kunitachi, Tokyo, 186-8603, Japan

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, 2-1, Naka, Kunitachi, Japan

    K. Sakai

  2. Research Center for Price Dynamics, Hitotsubashi University, 2-1, Naka, Kunitachi, Japan

    T. Watanabe

Authors
  1. K. Sakai
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  2. T. Watanabe
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Correspondence to K. Sakai.

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Sakai, K., Watanabe, T. The firm as a bundle of barcodes. Eur. Phys. J. B 76, 507–512 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2010-00069-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2010-00069-6

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