Distributions of BCG absolute magnitudes. Shaded areas: BCGs in the EQL CG sample. We show in the continuous green line the distribution of absolute magnitudes resulting from the combined luminosity of the EQL LG BCG and: the second brightest galaxy in the group (top left panel); the third brightest galaxy (top right panel); the fourth brightest galaxy (bottom left panel); and a galaxy randomly chosen among the 2nd-, 3rd- and 4th-ranked galaxies. The distributions shown in the dashed violet line, are similar to the green ones, but we allow for an up to 30% randomly chosen fraction of stars to be lost in the merging process. We quote in each panel the χ² statistics of the comparison between the models and the shaded distribution.