Scaling in a nonconservative earthquake model of self-organized criticality

We numerically investigate the Olami-Feder-Christensen model for earthquakes in order to characterize its scaling behavior. We show that ordinary finite size scaling in the model is violated due to global, system wide events. Nevertheless we find that subsystems of linear dimension small compared to the overall system size obey finite (subsystem) size scaling, with universal critical coefficients, for the earthquake events localized within the subsystem. We provide evidence, moreover, that large earthquakes responsible for breaking finite-size scaling are initiated predominantly near the boundary.