She found six papers and one book in which a power law distribution is fitted to data on battle deaths per war. In each case, a power law was found to be a plausible fit for the conflict data. Estimates for the of conflict death data range from 1.35 to 1.74, with a mean of 1.60. Anything in this range would be considered a relatively low value of (most empirical power laws have values between 2 and 3). In other words, if these estimates are accurate, the tail of the battle death distributions is scarily long.
Nitpick. I think “tail index” is missing before ” of conflict death data range”.
Hi Stephen and Rani,
Nitpick. I think “tail index” is missing before ” of conflict death data range”.