Pareto's Law

Pareto's law is either of the following closely related ideas:

Over the years, Pareto's Law has proved remarkably close to observed data.

Fund-raising, like other forms of human activity, has reference to Pareto's Law; a relatively few causes account for most results.

We've all heard variations on Pareto's law.

Pareto's law concerns the distribution of income.

The Pareto distribution is a probability distribution used, among other things, as a mathematical realization of Pareto's law.

A few notable examples of power laws are the Gutenberg-Richter law for earthquake sizes, Pareto's law of income distribution, structural self-similarity of fractals, and scaling laws in biological systems.

The finding that Web visitors are distributed among sites according to the universal power law mirrors what social scientists refer to as Pareto's Law - named for a late 19th-century Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, who studied different countries and found the statistics of inequality in the distribution of wealth showed a remarkable similarity.