In recent years, understanding the structure and function of complex networks has become the foundation for explaining many different real- world complex biological, technological and informal social phenomena. Techniques from statistical physics have been successfully applied to the analysis of...

The idea of architectures of control is introduced through examples ranging from urban planning to digital rights management, and the intentions behind their use in consumer products are examined, with reference to case studies of printer cartridges and proposed ‘optimum lifetime products.’...

We investigate the incentives of a monopolistic seller to delay the introduction of a new and improved version of his product. By analyzing a three-period model, we show that the seller may prefer to delay introducing a new product, even though the enabling technologies for the product are...

The paper examines the effects of the degree of competition on the firms' decision to innovate in differentiated markets. We find that a low (high) degree of product differentiation (competition) weakly supports the introduction of new products. Firms' weakly favour a process innovation if the...

For a market of horizontal product differentiation, the paper examines the effects of the level of competition on the firm’s decision between a product and process innovation. When firms have to choose between the two types of innovation, it is demonstrated that both firms undertake the...