Chapter 13 - Sharing strategies: carsharing, shared micromobility (bikesharing and scooter sharing), transportation network companies, microtransit, and other innovative mobility modes

Shared mobility—the shared use of a vehicle, bicycle, or other mode—is an innovative transportation strategy that enables users to gain short-term access to transportation modes on an “as-needed” basis. It includes various forms of carsharing, bikesharing, scooter sharing, ridesharing (carpooling and vanpooling), transportation network companies (TNCs), and microtransit. Included in this ecosystem are smartphone “apps” that aggregate and optimize these mobility options, as well as “courier network services” that provide last mile package and food delivery. This chapter describes different models that have emerged in shared mobility and reviews research that has quantified the environmental, social, and transportation-related impacts of these services

Peer-to-Peer File Sharing and Cultural Trade Protectionism

We examine the Internet’s impact on the cross-border distribution of cultural goods and assess its implications for cultural policy and cultural diversity. We present a stylized model of a two-country economy where governments are endowed with political preferences over the consumption of domestic content and enact import barriers and subsidies to protect it. We introduce peer-to-peer file sharing as a distinct distribution channel enabled by the Internet that provides access to all media products at a low cost. We report two main findings. First, the Internet renders legacy cultural policy inefficient, and the elimination of import barriers and the reduction of subsidized production can be desirable even when governments exhibit paternalistic preferences favoring the consumption of domestic content. And second, even though the Internet increases cultural diversity within countries, it can also reduce diversity across them

The Fluidity of an Individual’s Core-Periphery Position in Digital Knowledge Fields

The literature on digital knowledge fields suggests that knowledge coproducers are embedded in a core-periphery social structure. This structure engenders an individual-level tension: be in the core where there is support for successful knowledge integration, or be in the periphery where one can work outside of peer pressure. In this paper, we focus on the fluidity of core-periphery structures in digital knowledge fields. We study the case of nanoHUB, a digital, interdisciplinary knowledge field of nanoscience and engineering. We analyze 17,821 contributions made by 251 knowledge producers who coproduce 609 scientific simulation tools over a nearly ten-year period, encompassing over six million lines of code. We find that knowledge producers seek to resolve the core-periphery tension by moving towards and then away from the temporal core. Additionally, we find that proximity to the temporal core at the point of the knowledge production has a curvilinear relationship with code produced

Internet Predictions

More than a dozen leading experts give their opinions on where the Internet is headed and where it will be in the next decade in terms of technology, policy, and applications. They cover topics ranging from the Internet of Things to climate change to the digital storage of the future. A summary of the articles is available in the Web extras section

The Future of the Internet

Presents findings from a survey of technology leaders, scholars, industry officials, and analysts. Evaluates the network infrastructure's vulnerability to attack, and the Internet's impact on various institutions and activities in the coming decade