Industry Life Cycle and the Evolution of an Industry Network

This paper addresses the problem of the general validity of models of the industry life cycle, which have been proposed to analyse the long-term evolution of many industries, exhibiting a typical pattern of shakeout. We study a case of non shake-out in the commercial jet aero-engine industry, marked by a small number of entry events distributed over 40 years of industry evolution, by no exits and by a resulting slowly increasing number of firms. We argue that the vertical structure of the industry, as represented by the network of vertical relations between aero-engine suppliers and aircraft manufacturers, "regulated" the process of entry and exit and posed the conditions for a non shakeout to take place.industry life cycle; entry, exit; network; vertical relations

Why open source software can succeed

The paper discusses three key economic problems raised by the emergence and diffusion of Open source software: motivation, coordination, and diffusion under a dominant standard. First, the movement took off through the activity of a software development community that deliberately did not follow profit motivations. Second, a hierarchical coordination emerged without the support of an organization with proprietary rights. Third, Linux and other open source systems diffused in an environment dominated by established proprietary standards, which benefited from significant increasing returns. The paper shows that recent developments in the theory of critical mass in the diffusion of technologies with network externality may help to explain these phenomena.Open Source, Diffusion, Network Externality.

Network Structure and Industrial Dynamics. The long-term evolution of the aircraft-engine industry

This paper proposes a new approach to explain the long-term evolution of a supplier industry. The network of vertical relations between suppliers and buyers is identified as a determinant of the concentration of the supplier industry and of the dynamics of market shares. The vertical structure of the industry is captured by collecting information on all vertical relations between dyads of firms and by building matrices of interaction for the aircraft-engine industry from 1953 to 1997. An econometric exercise is used to test some hypotheses about the relation between selected network measures and industrial dynamics.industrial dynamics; vertically-related industries; network; industrial concentration; market shares.

Innovation and Standards in Clinical Practice: The Case of HIV Treatments

The goal of this study was to analyze the emergence of treatment standards associated with the adoption of anti-HIV drug innovations in the empirical setting of Italian clinical practice. Due to the rapid pace of technological change and the initial uncertainty concerning capabilities and indications of new treatments, the emergence of standard patterns of care turned out to be far from predictable and straightforward. Health providers' links to an international medicine and their internal coordination mechanisms were found to be associated with clinical decisions. Effectiveness and health costs of diverging treatment strategies were also compared.Medical innovation, Treatment standard, Clinical guidelines, HIV/AIDS, Sequence analysis

The long term evolution of vertically-related industries

The paper develops the argument that the long-term structural evolution of an industry depends on the evolution of a vertically-related, downstream industry. We analyse two pairs of vertically-related industries, the jet and turboprop aircraft and engine industries, since the first introduction of the jet and turboprop technologies to 1998. The paper shows that the evolutionary dynamics of the downstream industry, in terms of number of firms and products, entry, exit and concentration, is transmitted to the upstream industry via the structure of the network of vertical exchange relations. We identify two network configurations, partitioned and hierarchical, and show that they are responsible for sharply different transmission effects. An econometric analysis is carried out to demonstrate this difference in the turboprop and jet markets.vertically-related industries; network; industrial concentration; entry; exit.