Probability Distributions for Commodity Flows

Abstract

In elementary statistical mechanics, the entropy of a physical system of particles can be determined statistically by counting the number of possible microstates which correspond to a given macrostate. Although all of the early microstate descriptions were based upon Boltzmann statistics, the advance of quantum mechanics focused attention on three other statistical forms, namely Maxwell-Boltzmann, Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein distributions. Each of these forms corresponds to a particular assumption about the manner in which microstates are grouped into macrostates.