Given enough choice, a large population of customers, and negligible stocking and distribution costs, the selection and buying pattern of the population results in the demand across products having a power law distribution or Pareto distribution. It is important to understand why some distributions are normal vs. long tail (power) distributions. Chris Anderson argues that while quantities such as human height or IQ follow a normal distribution, in scale-free networks with preferential attachments, power law distributions are created, i.e. because some nodes are more connected than others (like Malcolm Gladwell’s “mavens” in The Tipping Point).[10][11]