Existence of Hierarchies and Human's Pursuit of Top Hierarchy Lead to Power Law

The power law is ubiquitous in natural and social phenomena, and is considered as a universal relationship between the frequency and its rank for diverse social systems. However, a general model is still lacking to interpret why these seemingly unrelated systems share great similarity. Through a detailed analysis of natural language texts and simulation experiments based on the proposed ‘Hierarchical Selection Model’, we found that the existence of hierarchies and human’s pursuit of top hierarchy lead to the power law. Further, the power law is a statistical and emergent performance of hierarchies, and it is the universality of hierarchies that contributes to the ubiquity of the power law.