IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-1-4757-2763-0_8.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Proportional growth with or without diffusion, and other explanations of scaling

In: Fractals and Scaling in Finance

Author

Listed:
  • Benoit B. Mandelbrot

    (Yale University, Mathematics Department)

Abstract

However useful and “creative” scaling may be, it is not accepted as an irreducible scientific principle. Several isolated instances of scaling are both unquestioned and easy to reduce to more fundamental principles, as will be seen in Section 1. There also exists a broad class of would-be universal explanations, many of them variants of proportional growth of U, with or without diffusion of log U. This chapter shows why, countering widely accepted opinion, I view those explanations as unconvincing and unacceptable. The models to be surveyed and criticized in this expository text were scattered in esoteric and repetitive references. Those I quote are the ear?liest I know. Many were rephrased in terms of the distribution of the sizes of firms. They are easily translated into terms of other scaling random variables that are positive. The two-tailed scaling variables that represent change of speculative prices (M 1963b{E14}) pose a different problem, since the logarithm of a negative change has no meaning.

Suggested Citation

  • Benoit B. Mandelbrot, 1997. "Proportional growth with or without diffusion, and other explanations of scaling," Springer Books, in: Fractals and Scaling in Finance, chapter 0, pages 219-251, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-1-4757-2763-0_8
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4757-2763-0_8
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-1-4757-2763-0_8. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.