A Universal Lifetime Distribution for Multi-Species Systems

Abstract: Lifetime distributions of social entities, such as enterprises, products, and media contents, are one of the fundamental statistics characterizing the social dynamics. To investigate the lifetime distribution of mutually interacting systems, simple models having a rule for additions and deletions of entities are investigated. We found a quite universal lifetime distribution for various kinds of inter-entity interactions, and it is well fitted by a stretched-exponential function with an exponent close to 1/2. We propose a "modified Red-Queen" hypothesis to explain this distribution. We also review empirical studies on the lifetime distribution of social entities, and discussed the applicability of the model.