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My UCLA/Harvard Talk on Extreme Statistics in Movies and Pharmaceuticals
publication date: Aug 10, 2011
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author/source: Arthur De Vany
Looking through the slides you will find one that shows the growth (and decay) rate of pharma companies is Levy Stable distributed; the distribution is leptokurtotic and has infinite variance. It is known that the growth rate of pharma companies depends primarily on a blockbuster in their portfolio. This is true of the movies as well; a single movie can change the market share of a distributor dramatically. The downside of this blockbuster effect is that a firm's sales can plummet with the withdrawal of a single drug such as we have seen with Vioxx and Bextra.
Download the slides.
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