Determination of the index and uncertainty of the power-law fitted to the high-mass end of the cumulative CMF, measured for the populations of prestellar cores (in blue) and protostellar cores (in red). Each bootstrapping probability density function (coloured histograms) is built from 3000 slopes, α_i, fitted using the MLE method of the powerlaw package. Power-law indices, α_BS, are taken to be the peak of the exponentially modified Gaussian (EMG) fits (blue and red solid lines) ; their asymmetric uncertainties are estimated from the −1σ and +1σ standard deviations of the EMG (dotted segments). The α_fit values obtained by the MLE fit of the original data (see Fig. 9) are shown by vertical black lines. The power-law index of canonical Salpeter IMF (−1.35, dashed magenta lines) is shown for comparison.