Anomalous Growth of Aging Populations.

We consider a discrete-time population dynamics with age-dependent structure. At every time step, one of the alive individuals from the population is chosen randomly and removed with probability $$q_k$$ depending on its age, whereas a new individual of age 1 is born with probability r. The model can also describe a single queue in which the service order is random while the service efficiency depends on a customer's 'age' in the queue. We propose a mean field approximation to investigate the long-time asymptotic behavior of the mean population size. The age dependence is shown to lead to anomalous power-law growth of the population at the critical regime. The scaling exponent is determined by the asymptotic behavior of the probabilities $$q_k$$ at large k. The mean field approximation is validated by Monte Carlo simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]