Reilly's Law of Retail Gravitation

Reilly's law of retail gravitation is a deterministic model that predicts how an intermediate town's retail trade divides between two larger competing cities. Formulated by William J. Reilly in 1931 by analogy with Newtonian gravity, it states that each city attracts trade in direct proportion to its population and in inverse proportion to the square of the distance to it. Solving for the point of equal attraction yields the famous breaking point — the boundary along the route between two cities where their trade areas meet.