Transaction costs, one often hears, are the economic equivalent of friction in physical systems. Like physicists, economists can sometimes neglect friction in formulating theories; but like engineers, they can never neglect friction in studying how the system actually does let alone should work....

This paper's title is an echo of Alfred Chandler's (2001) chronicle of the electronics industry, Inventing the Electronic Century. The paper attempts (A) a general reinterpretation of the pattern of technological advance in (American) electronics over the twentieth century and (B) a somewhat...

Die Relevanz der Konstruktionsweise von Gütern hat in den vergangenen Jahren verstärkte Beachtung in der ökonomischen Literatur gefunden. Insbesondere die Konsequenzen einer modularen Gestaltung von Produkten rückten dabei in den Vordergrund. Dabei wird meist davon ausgegangen, dass sich aus...

Utilizamos herramientas de análisis de redes para identificar las comunidades de países de destino de los exportadores. Nuestra medida de comunidad está basada en el resultado de decisiones reales, captura la dependencia multilateral entre países en lugar de la dependencia bilateral, y se...

In concept, online communities allow people to access the wide range of knowledge and abilities of a heterogeneous group of users. In reality, current implementations of various online communities suffer from a lack of participation by the most qualified users. The participation of qualified...

This paper investigates how information flows enable social networks to constitute social capital. By analyzingthe information content encoded in email communication in an executive recruiting firm, we examinethe long held but empirically untested assumption that diverse networks drive economic...

We study the fine-grained relationships among information flows, IT use,and individual information-worker productivity, by analyzing work at amidsize executive recruiting firm. We analyze both project-level andindividual-level performance using: (1) direct observation of over125,000 e-mail...

Researchers and practitioners increasingly are gaining access to data onexplicit social networks. For example, telecommunications and technologyfirms record data on consumer networks (via phone calls, emails,voice-over-IP, instant messaging), and social-network portal sites suchas MySpace,...