Inventive productivity and the statistics of exceedances

Abstract

We show that inventive productivity can be described by two variables, Frenquency and Lifetime. For several samples of inventors, we show that the Exponential and Generalized Pareto distributions provide excellent goodness-of-fit to these variables. Furthermore, good fits to these distributions arises naturally from the statistics of exceedance. Thus, a better theoretical foundation and connection to environmental variables is shown for Frequency and Lifetime than has been shown for Lotka's Law.