The phenomenon of electronic commerce has led to a proliferation of web sites competing for the attention and resources of millions of consumers. As has been recently shown, the resulting dynamics is such that a few sites command most of the traffic in the web, a signature of a winner-take-all...

In the emerging age of electronic commerce, it is of paramount importance to design mechanisms that ensure timely and reliable transactions in cyberspace. This is an important problem given the bursty nature of Internet congestion, which leads to large variability in the risk and cost of...

We present a dynamical model of web site growth in order to explore the effects of competition among web sites and to determine how they affect the nature of markets. We show that under general conditions, as the competition between sites increases, the model exhibits a sudden transition from a...