A mechanism to derive multi-power law functions: An application in the econophysics framework

It is generally recognized that economical systems, and more in general complex systems, are characterized by power law distributions. Sometime, these distributions show a changing of the slope in the tail so that, more appropriately, they show a multi-power law behavior. We present a method to derive analytically a two-power law distribution starting from a single power law function recently obtained, in the frameworks of the generalized statistical mechanics based on the Sharma-Taneja-Mittal information measure. In order to test the method, we fit the cumulative distribution of personal income and gross domestic production of several countries, obtaining a good agreement for a wide range of data. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.