For those interested in some related theory, there is a nice paper on ranking processes in complex systems [1,2].
Also of interest is extreme value theory [3], a cool--but hard!--branch of statistics.
[1] Journal link: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.10...
[2] Semantic Scholar PDF: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0233/05eda86eb88589b6b28ec4...