Being slightly better than a rival can win you nearly the entire market

In a winner-take-all market, a performer only marginally better than rivals can capture a wildly disproportionate share of rewards — a pattern economists Robert Frank and Philip Cook traced across sports, entertainment and, increasingly, ordinary professions. Technology lets the very best serve a global audience at almost no extra cost, so the gap between the top performer and the merely very good keeps widening, reshaping income inequality in fields that never used to work this way.

— Robert H. Frank & Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society — 1995
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