West's work in complexity science; developed at the Santa Fe Institute; provides the empirical and mathematical foundation for understanding why power law distributions are the rule rather than the exception in complex systems, and why the dynamics that produce them are universal across cities, companies, biological organisms, and markets. Scale (2017) is the primary reference. The key insight for this framework is West's demonstration that the scaling laws governing companies are not fundamentally different from those governing cities and biological networks: they follow power laws, involve superlinear returns to size, and are driven by network effects that compound rather than average. The company that is twice as big is not twice as productive; it is disproportionately more connected, more visible, and more resourced in ways that compound further. This provides the empirical grounding for the preferential attachment mechanism: it is not a quirk of specific markets but a general property of complex networks. The cumulative advantage dynamic is not contingent on a particular industry structure; it is structural to how complex systems work.