Eur. Phys. J. B 76, 507-512 (2010)
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

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.