ABSTRACT
The Pareto distribution is a highly skewed reverse J-shaped distribution that holds a special attraction for economists and for social scientists. It is named for Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian-born Swiss professor of economics who formulated it ( 1897) as a model for the distribution of incomes. In recent years it has been the subject of investigations by numerous writers. Among these are Zipf (1949), Muniruzzaman (1950, 1957), Hagstroem (1960), Harris (1968), Mandelbrodt (1960), Srivastava ( 1965), Malik (1966, 1970), Cirillo (1979), and Arnold ( 1983). Johnson and Kotz (1970, Vol. 1) present an excellent expository account of this distribution together with discussions of some of its applications and a lengthy list of references.
