To account quantitatively for many reported « natural » fat tail distributions in Nature and Economy, we propose the stretched exponential family as a complement to the often used power law distributions. It has many advantages, among which to be economical with only two adjustable parameters with clear physical interpretation. Furthermore, it derives from a simple and generic mechanism in terms of multiplicative processes. We show that stretched exponentials describe very well the distributions of radio and light emissions from galaxies, of US GOM OCS oilfield reserve sizes, of World, US and French agglomeration sizes, of country population sizes, of daily Forex US-Mark and Franc-Mark price variations, of Vostok temperature variations, of the Raup-Sepkoski's kill curve and of citations of the most cited physicists in the world. We also briefly discuss its potential for the distribution of earthquake sizes and fault displacements and earth temperature variations over the last 400 000 years. We suggest physical interpretations of the parameters and provide a short toolkit of the statistical properties of the stretched exponentials. We also provide a comparison with other distributions, such as the shifted linear fractal, the log-normal and the recently introduced parabolic fractal distributions.
1-IntroductionFrequency or probability distribution functions (pdf) that decay as a power law of their argument P(x) dx = P 0 x -(1+µ) dx (1) have acquired a special status in the last decade. They are sometimes called ``fractal'' (even if this term is more appropriate for the description of self-similar geometrical objects rather than statistical distributions). A power law distribution characterizes the absence of a characteristic size : independently of the value of x, the number of realizations larger dans λx is λ -µ times the number of realizations larger than x. In contrast, an exponential for instance or any other functional dependence does not enjoy this self-similarity, as the existence of a characteristic scale destroys this continuous scale invariance property [1]. In words, a power law pdf is such that there is the same proportion of smaller and larger events, whatever the size one is looking at within the power law range.The asymptotic existence of power laws is a well-established fact in statistical physics and critical phenomena with exact solutions available for the 2D Ising model, for selfavoiding walks, for lattice animals, etc.[2], with an abondance of numerical evidence for instance for the distribution of percolation clusters at criticality [3] and for many other models in statistical physics. There is in addition the observation from numerical simulations that simple ``sandpile'' models of spatio-temporal dynamics with strong non-linear behavior [4] give power law distributions of avalanche sizes. Furthermore, precise experiments on critical phenomena confirm the asymptotic existence of power laws, for instance on superfluid helium at the lambda point and on binary mixtures [5]. These are th...