A review of power laws in real life phenomena

Power law distributions, also known as heavy tail distributions, model distinct real life phenomena in the areas of biology, demography, computer science, economics, information theory, language, and astronomy, amongst others. In this paper, it is presented a review of the literature having in mind applications and possible explanations for the use of power laws in real phenomena. We also unravel some controversies around power laws.

► We applied Pareto-like (PL) laws to distinct data and unraveled difficulties in proving analytically the fitting in some cases. ► We studied Example 9 following PL behavior and computed the locus of (C, a) points for the whole set. ► α is the Pareto coefficient and C is a parameter of the Pareto distribution. ► We found that (C, a) points revealed global characteristics of phenomena described by PLs. ► Useful consequences will be drawn by adding new data and phenomena.