As communication limitations become the dominant factor in designing products, devices connected by networks will become common. Most companies will not want to design their own interconnection fabric but will, instead, opt to buy an off the shelf interconnect system. Thus, vendors will offer “commodity” interconnects that are easy to integrate into other products and have good performance over...

The level of price volatility should theoretically be confined to export parity price levels at the lower end and import parity price levels at the upper end of the price band, reflecting supply and demand conditions during surplus and deficit marketing seasons respectively. A greater gap between these export and import parity prices will reflect high marketing costs, often representing high tr...

Trust is central to all transactions and yet economists rarely discuss the notion. It is treated rather as background environment, present whenever called upon, a sort of ever-ready lubricant that permits voluntary participation in production and exchange. In the standard model of a market economy it is taken for granted that consumers meet their budget constraints: they are not allowed to spen...

In this paper we analyzed cross-correlations in commodity markets investigating correlations of future contracts for commodities over the period 1998.09.01 2007.12.14. We constructed a minimal spanning tree based on the correlation matrix. The tree provides evidence for sector clusterization of investigated contracts. We also studied dynamic properties of correlations. It turned out that the ma...

We study the topological properties of the multinetwork of commodity-specific trade relations among world countries over the 1992-2003 period, comparing them with those of the aggregate-trade network, known in the literature as the international-trade network (ITN). We show that link-weight distributions of commodity-specific networks are extremely heterogeneous and (quasi) log normality of agg...

Central to freight movement models is an understanding of where the freight commodities are produced and consumed. An important driver in the production and/or consumption of each commodity is the production and consumption of other commodities. In this paper, these important interactions between commodities are captured in a path based freight model which incorporates models of commodity produ...

Studies of the shifting social organization and geography of global garment production have been critical to development of the commodity chains framework as an important field of study for scholars of political economy in various disciplines. Our paper intervenes in this literature by proposing what we call a `disarticulations' perspective, an approach attentive to historical and spatial proce...

In order to understand the differences between gift exchange and commodity exchange, it is useful to consider gift exchange in a formal analytical fashion that permits immediate comparison with the standard formal model of commodity exchange. However, this cannot be done without serious distortion if the neoclassical model of commodity exchange is imposed on the analysis of gifts. Rather, one r...

Persistent differences in interest rates across countries account for much of the profitability of currency carry trade strategies. The high-interest rate “investment” currencies tend to be “commodity currencies,” while low interest rate “funding” currencies tend to belong to countries that export finished goods and import most of their commodities. We develop a general equilibrium model of com...

1 See, for example, Mario Gerla in the IEEE MASS 2004 panel, and Victor Bahl's opening talk at the Mesh Networking Summit 2004.