Pareto principle

For other uses of the word pareto, see Pareto.

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, 80% of the effects comes from 20% of the causes. Business management thinker Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy went to 20% of the population. It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., "80% of your sales comes from 20% of your clients."

It is worthy of note that some applications of the Pareto principle are appeals to a pseudo-scientific "law of nature" to bolster non-quantifiable or non-verifiable assertions that are "painted with a broad brush". The fact that hedges such as the 90/10, 70/30, and 95/5 "rules" exist is sufficient evidence of the non-exactness of the Pareto principle. On the other hand, there is adequate evidence that "clumping" of factors does occur in most phenomena.

The Pareto principle is only tangentially related to Pareto efficiency, which was also introduced by the same economist, Vilfredo Pareto. Pareto developed both concepts in the context of the distribution of income and wealth among the population.

Practical applications

The observation was in connection with income and wealth. Pareto noticed that 80% of Italy's wealth was owned by 20% of the population. He then carried out surveys on a variety of other countries and found to his surprise that a similar distribution applied.

It also applies to a variety of more mundane matters: one might guess approximately that we wear our 20% most favoured clothes about 80% of the time, perhaps we spend 80% of the time with 20% of our acquaintances, etc.

The Pareto principle has many applications in quality control. It is the basis for the pareto chart, one of the key tools used in total quality control and six sigma. The Pareto principle serves as a baseline for ABC-analysis and XYZ-analysis, widely used in logistics and procurement for the purpose of optimizing stock of goods, as well as costs of keeping and replenishing that stock.

In computer science the Pareto principle can be applied to optimization (computer science) phrases.

Theil index

The Theil index is an entropy measure used to quantify inequities. The measure is 0 for 50:50 distributions and reaches 1 at a Pareto distribution of 82:18. Higher inequities yield Theil indices above 1.

Mathematical notes

The idea has rule-of-thumb application in many places, but it is commonly misused. For example, it is a misuse to state that a solution to a problem "fits the 80-20 rule" just because it fits 80% of the cases; it must be implied that this solution requires only 20% of the resources needed to solve all cases.

Mathematically, where something is shared among a sufficiently large set of participants, there will always be a number k between 50 and 100 such that k% is taken by (100 − k)% of the participants; however, k may vary from 50 in the case of equal distribution to nearly 100 in the case of a tiny number of participants taking almost all of the resources. There is nothing special about the number 80, but many systems will have k somewhere around this region of intermediate imbalance in distribution.

This is a special case of the wider phenomenon of Pareto distributions. If the parameters in the Pareto distribution are suitably chosen, then one would have not only 80% of effects coming from 20% of causes, but also 80% of that top 80% of effects coming from 20% of that top 20% of causes, and so on (80% of 80% is 64%; 20% of 20% is 4%, so this implies a "64-4 law").

One should not be seduced by the symmetry of the idealised case: 80-20 is only a shorthand for the general principle at work. In individual cases, the distribution could just as well be say 80-10 or 80-30. (There is no need for the two numbers to add up to 100%, as they are measures of different things, eg 'number of customers' vs 'amount spent'). The classic 80-20 distribution occurs when the gradient of the line is -1 when plotted on log-log axes of equal scaling. Pareto rules are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, the 0-0 and 100-100 rules always hold.

Note, however, that sometimes adding up to 100 is indeed meaningful. For example, if 80% of effects come from the top 20% of sources, then the remaining 20% of effects come from the lower 80% of sources. This is called the "joint ratio", and can be used to measure the degree of imbalance: a joint ratio of 96:4 is very imbalanced, 80:20 is significantly imbalanced (Gini index: 60%), 70:30 is moderately imbalanced (Gini index: 40%), and 55:45 is just slightly imbalanced.

See also

• 10-90 gap
• Benford's law
• Mathematical economics
• Sturgeon's law
• The Long Tail
• Vitality curve
• Wealth condensation
• Zipf's law
• Principle of least effort
• Richard Koch

Examples

• Megadiverse countries

External links

• Wealth Condensation in Pareto Macro-Economies
• "The Eighty-Twenty Rule" at the Free Online Dictionary of Computing, further explaining its application to program design
• Applying the 80-20 Rule to Daily Activities
• Pareto's Principle comprehensive information
• About.com: Pareto's Principle
• 80-20 rules (in romanian)
• 80-20 in horseracing
• An attempt to prove Pareto's 80/20 Law
• Application of the 80/20 law to data density estimation
• Images and Graphs depicting the 80-20 rule 80-20 Rule
• [http://www.mrdashboard.com/Pareto.htm Applying the Pareto Principle in Business