https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2010-00069-6
The firm as a bundle of barcodes
1
Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, 2-1, Naka, Kunitachi, Japan
2
Research Center for Price Dynamics, Hitotsubashi University, 2-1, Naka, Kunitachi, Japan
Corresponding author: a ksakai@ier.hit-u.ac.jp
Received:
3
July
2009
Revised:
18
December
2009
Published online:
23
February
2010
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.
© EDP Sciences, Società Italiana di Fisica, Springer-Verlag, 2010