How to interpret/do a correlation/regression analysis if underlying relation has to be asymptotic? I want to do a correlation/regression analysis of a dependent and an independet variable.
I've got the following problem:
I want to analyze how the number of produced goods affects the price.
At the beginning with a raising number of produced goods the price drops quite fast but then it flattens out.
From the theory of the problem I'd say that the realtion is asymptotic (see drawing).
Somehow I can't really find a way on how to do a correlation/regression analysis on asymptotic data though.
Shouldnt be this relation of variables be quite common?
Hope that someone could help me..
Thanks guys


One would need to do power law analysis. See the seminal paper, Power-law distributions in empirical data. There is an R package poweRlaw to help in this direction.
Edit: Nice suggestion from @whuber, due to frequency of posts in CV, exponential decay can also be used to model such data. However, intrinsically different than power laws, see discussion Difference between power law distribution and exponential decay
