Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 088102 (2002) [4 pages]Diffusion, Peer Pressure, and Tailed DistributionsReceived 11 February 2002; published 5 August 2002 We present a general, physically motivated nonlinear and nonlocal advection equation in which the diffusion of interacting random walkers competes with a local drift arising from a kind of peer pressure. We show, using a mapping to an integrable dynamical system, that on varying a parameter the steady-state behavior undergoes a transition from the standard diffusive behavior to a localized stationary state characterized by a tailed distribution. Finally, we show that recent empirical laws on economic growth can be explained as a collective phenomenon due to peer pressure interaction. © 2002 The American Physical Society URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.89.088102
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.89.088102
PACS:
87.23.Ge, 05.40.Fb, 64.60.Ht, 89.65.Gh
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