Relationship between exponent of power-law distributions and exponent of cumulative distributions

Abstract

We commented on Ref.[Andrade J S, Herrmann H J, Andrade R F S, et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 018702 (2005)] and corrected the approach to estimate the degree distribution of the Apollonian network. However, after reading our manuscript, Herrmann indicated that it was due to a small typographic error and Herrmann et al. published Ref. [Andrade J S, Herrmann H J, Andrade R F S, et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 079901 (2009)]. In this paper, the relationship between an exponent of power-law distributions and the exponent of cumulative distributions is studied. For power-law distribution with geometrically growing domain, we prove that its exponent is equal to the exponent of its cumulative distribution. We carried out numerical simulations and obtain results that are in good agreement with the theoretical analysis.