The Firms as a Bundle of Barcodes

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 reshuffe 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.日本学術振興会・科学研究費補助金（学術創成研究費） = JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Creative Scientific Research6 p