This paper discusses the design, implementation and use of standards from the perspective of transaction costs economics. A proper design and implementation of standards may lead to a considerable reduction of transaction costs, which enhances trade and, consequently, economic welfare. A major example is the use of containers, which has drastically changed the worldwide transport infrastructure...

Where increasing returns to adoption play a role in the diffusion of a new technology, technological "lock-in" is now often claimed to occur. However, this result, and the modeling approach that produces it, are problematic. Further innovations could never have a chance of disseminating, if "lock-in" had occurred in the diffusion process of earlier innovations. Yet, in reality, industrial chang...

When are we locked in a path? This is one of the main questions concerning path dependency. Coming from Arthur's model of increasing returns and technology adoption (Arthur 1989), this paper addresses the question of when and how a lock-in occurs. To gain a better understanding of the path process, different modifications are made. First, the random selection of two types of adopters is substit...

The present paper is concerned with the design of lock gates submitted to ship impacts. In this paper, a simplified analytical method is presented to evaluate the resistance of such structures under collision. The basic idea is to assume that the resistance is first provided through a local deforming mode, corresponding to a localized crushing of some impacted structural elements. For consecuti...

A customer experiences “lock-in” when switching costs exceed the potential incremental value of alternative suppliers’ products over its current supplier’s product. Customers may regret this state of affairs if they would have been better off having secured the alternative product from the start, or more simply, if the switching costs were substantially lower than the incremental value of the a...

A session-based process satisfies the progress property if its sessions never get stuck when it is executed in an adequate context. Previous work studied how to define progress by introducing the notion of catalysers, execution contexts generated from the type of a process. In this paper, we refine such definition to capture a more intuitive notion of context adequacy for checking progress. Int...

We investigate the effects of forward looking behavior in technology adoption. The setup is an overlapping generation model where agents choose between two alternative networks taking in consideration both the installed base and the expected base. The latter element is the distinctive feature of our approach. We use results from the global games literature to select the unique equilibrium on wh...

Due to the immateriality of financial services and products they lend themselves handsomely for sale on the WWW. This may be one of the main reasons why the financial services industry has gained a cutting edge in the net with respect to other industries. Thus, at the beginning of the third millennium, the market for financial services is undergoing a fundamental shift since it is questionable ...

In traditional IT outsourcing and multisourcing arrangements, clients isolate vendor tasks, resulting in modular sourcing structures. But this approach can stifle vendor competition, result in vendor lock-in and hinder organizational flexibility. The full article describes how adidas adopted a new type of multisourcing strategy, which embraces vendor overlaps to overcome these constraints, and ...