What are the prospects of B2B electronic commerce when production is carried out by a number of small firms specialized in single production phases? Prato, Italy, is home to thousands of textile firms as well as the locus of an early and innovative experience of a local Internet in the...

This article presents an agent-based model of an Italian textile district where thousands of small firms specialise in particular phases of fabrics production. It is an empirical model that reconstructs the communications between firms when they arrange production chains. In their turn,...

The cultural economy is defined in terms of a set of sectors ranging from certain traditional artisanal industries like clothing or jewelry on the one side, to newer media industries like sound recording or television program production on the other. I provide an overview of the industrial...

Agent-based models, an instance of the wider class of connectionist models, allow bottom-up simulations of organizations constituted byu a large number of interacting parts. Thus, geogrfaphical clusters of competing or collaborating firms constitute an obvious field of application. This...

A general outline of the functional and spatial characteristics of the clothing industry in Southern California is sketched out. Two important trends are noted: (a) the increasing design- and knowledge-intensive structure of the industry and (b) the marked increase in offshore subcontracting by...

Mature federations have relatively transparent delineations of authority among levels of government; subnational governments enjoy considerable autonomy in their expenditure, revenue, and debt policies. In other countries, problems of soft budget constraints, bailouts, and fiscal and financial...

In this paper we argue that authorities aid cooperation by means of direct coordination or the enforcement of pre-commitment devices such as contract laws.Credible threats of violence allow this role. In a local interaction model, an authority forms if mutually connected individuals with...

In this paper we introduce DEA models that can be used to compute the way firms' profitability changes when the assignment of property rights changes.

This paper aims to make a public statement about the strategy implemented by Microsoft in order to reinforce its market power across the networked users of Windows Operative System, and Xbox Games Console. It is presented an economic view that supports the anticipating (not predatory) position...