Vertical transmission of culture and the distribution of family names. (English) Zbl 0984.92516
Summary: A stochastic model for the evolution of a growing population is proposed, in order to explain empirical power-law distributions in the frequency of family names as a function of the family size. Preliminary results show that the predicted exponents are in good agreement with real data. The evolution of family-name distributions is discussed in the frame of vertical transmission of cultural features.
MSC:
| 92D25 | Population dynamics (general) |
Keywords:
stochastic growing population evolution model; empirical power-law distributions; vertical cultural feature transmissionReferences:
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