[boxspam]

I wonder if there is a deeper structure/nature to business growth and popularity, something akin to the Matthew effect [1] ("to everyone who has more will be given") or power laws.

People have limited energy to store and rank objects, so they settle on one or two per field/subject, and all future energy goes into maintaining that categorization.

An example would be "Hulk Hogan", even though I am not interested in wrestling, I do know that name. If I am similar to others, such as journalists, this would explain why that name is getting bigger and bigger: people just add on energy on the current most popular choice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

[reubenswartz]

You may appreciate the book Scale[1], by Geoffrey West. I don't know if I completely buy all aspects of the book, but he looks at organisms, cities, and companies and suggests that there are certain fundamental scaling properties of these collections. IMHO, there are some fascinating ideas here, although the book seems more like a collection of papers with a bit of editing.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation-Sustainabi...

[mindcrime]

It's mentioned in the above WP article, but see also: Preferential Attachment. It's a notion from Network Science that helps explain this kind of phenomenon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment