Linking social systems failure of marriages and firms: A short note

Abstract

This study investigates the failure of social systems and tries to find a plausible mechanism. We observe stretched exponential distributions for failure of marriages in the U.S., UK, and Germany and extend evidence for power laws in large firms’ failure in the U.S., and worldwide. Since summation of stretched exponentials leads to power laws, one can establish an underlying principle to link different types of social systems failure like marriages and firms. Moreover, we postulate the generation of these fat-tailed distributions in social systems failure can be explained by the least effort principle of Zipf and suggest to increase initial efforts at individual level through marriage counseling, or stakeholder synchronization to reduce failures.