Ivory Tower Universities and Competitive Business Firms
arXiv:cond-mat/9906229 · doi:10.1038/22719
Abstract
There is nowadays considerable interest on ways to quantify the dynamics of research activities, in part due to recent changes in research and development (R&D) funding. Here, we seek to quantify and analyze university research activities, and compare their growth dynamics with those of business firms. Specifically, we analyze five distinct databases, the largest of which is a National Science Foundation database of the R&D expenditures for science and engineering of 719 United States (US) universities for the 17-year period 1979--1995. We find that the distribution of growth rates displays a ``universal'' form that does not depend on the size of the university or on the measure of size used, and that the width of this distribution decays with size as a power law. Our findings are quantitatively similar to those independently uncovered for business firms, and consistent with the hypothesis that the growth dynamics of complex organizations may be governed by universal mechanisms.
5 pages in multicolumn LaTeX format with 11 eps figures. To appear in Nature
References in corpus (1)
Cited by in corpus (31)
- Universal and non-universal properties of cross-correlations in financial time series
- Universality of citation distributions: towards an objective measure of scientific impact
- Scaling of the distribution of price fluctuations of individual companies
- A Poissonian explanation for heavy-tails in e-mail communication
- Scaling laws of human interaction activity
- On Universality in Human Correspondence Activity
- Persistence and Uncertainty in the Academic Career
- Self-Organized Percolation Model for Stock Market Fluctuations
- Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death
- Quantitative relations between corruption and economic factors
- Statistical Properties of Business Firms Structure and Growth
- Pareto law of the expenditure of a person in convenience stores
- Scaling behavior in land markets
- Generalised central limit theorems for growth rate distribution of complex systems
- Relations between allometric scalings and fluctuations in complex systems: The case of Japanese firms
- A coevolving model based on preferential triadic closure for social media networks
- The Geography of Scientific Productivity: Scaling in U.S. Computer Science
- A Generalized Preferential Attachment Model for Business Firms Growth Rates: I. Empirical Evidence
- Long-term evolution of email networks: Statistical regularities, predictability and stability of social behaviors
- Earthquake-like patterns of acoustic emission in crumpled plastic sheets
- Fat-tailed fluctuations in the size of organizations: the role of social influence
- Using HistCite software to identify significant articles in subject searches of the Web of Science
- The Production Function
- Power-law ansatz in complex systems: excessive loss of information
- A Continuous Time Asynchronous Model of the Stock Market; Beyond the LLS Model
- Heavy-tailed distributions of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths in spatiotemporal space
- Exploitation dynamics of fish stocks
- On the growth of primary industry and population of China's counties
- A 2D Levy-flight model for the complex dynamics of real-life financial markets
- Shift in house price estimates during COVID-19 reveals effect of crisis on collective speculation
- Scaling in the growth of geographically subdivided populations: invariant patterns from a continent-wide biological survey