When production is carried out by many geographically clustered small firms specialised in particular production phases that subcontract one another, what are the prospects of B2B electronic commerce? Prato, Italy, is home to thousands of textile firms as well as the locus of an early and...

This article presents a model of the structure of the information flows that underlie the creation of production chains between thousands of small textile firms located in Prato, central Italy. Contrary to most textile industry of western Europe and north America, Prato did not die out once...

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,...

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...