Editing Long tail (section)

==="Goodbye Pareto Principle"===
In a 2006 working paper titled "Goodbye Pareto Principle, Hello Long Tail",<ref>Brynjolfsson, Erik; Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Duncan Simester, 2006, [https://ssrn.com/abstract=953587 "Goodbye Pareto Principle, Hello Long Tail: The Effect of Search Costs on the Concentration of Product Sales"]</ref> [[Erik Brynjolfsson]], [[Yu (Jeffrey) Hu]], and Duncan Simester found that, by greatly lowering [[search engine technology|search]] costs, information technology in general and Internet markets in particular could substantially increase the collective share of hard-to-find products, thereby creating a longer tail in the distribution of sales.

They used a theoretical model to show how a reduction in search costs will affect the concentration in product sales. By analyzing data collected from a multi-channel retailing company, they showed empirical evidence that the Internet channel exhibits a significantly less concentrated sales distribution, when compared with traditional channels. An 80/20 rule fits the distribution of product sales in the catalog channel quite well, but in the Internet channel, this rule needs to be modified to a 72/28 rule in order to fit the distribution of product sales in that channel. The difference in the sales distribution is highly significant, even after controlling for consumer differences.