Law,Social Welfare,and Net Neutrality

Net neutrality generates wealth transfers from one type of internet content provider to another. In theory, these transfers might be socially desirable, and could be justified on the basis of informational externalities similar to those cited to justify fair use in copyright law. In practice, however, the conditions that justify fair use do not hold where net neutrality operates. Moreover, the internal subsidization required by net neutrality generates a regressive transfer. The welfare gains that might come from controlling anticompetitive abuse or government coercion through implementation of net neutrality can be achieved by alternative policies with less harmful consequences.     

Net Neutrality in Europe: Desperately seeking a market failure

Net Neutrality has become the focus of attention in the regulatory debate on the Internet. This article attempts to strip down the debate to its bare essential. It identifies two main types of Net Neutrality obligations that have been put forward and assesses what type of potential concerns they may be designed to address. It concludes that while some of these concerns may be important it remains doubtful (at least in Europe) that an ex ante per se rule, such as those proposed under the Net Neutrality term, is the best way to address them.     

Net Neutrality and internet fragmentation: The role of online advertising

We investigate the relation between Net Neutrality regulation and Internet fragmentation. We model a two-sided market, where Content Providers (CPs) and consumers interact through Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and CPs sell consumers' attention to advertisers. Under Net Neutrality, a zero-price rule is enforced. By contrast, in the Unregulated Regime, ISPs make access to their subscribers for CPs conditional on payment of a termination fee. Multiple impressions of an ad on the same consumer are partially wasteful. Thus, equilibrium ad rates decrease when audiences overlap. We show that ISPs may strategically set termination fees to induce fragmentation. This takes place when advertising revenues are potentially large but strongly diminished by competition among CPs, and when consumers are not highly sensitive to content availability. We therefore identify an important link between termination fees, the online advertising market and Internet fragmentation. We extend the model to account for multi-homing consumers, vertically integrated ISPs, third-party advertising platforms and heterogeneous CPs.     

Net Neutrality,Network Capacity,and Innovation at the Edges

We study how net neutrality regulations affect a high‐bandwidth content provider (CP)'s investment incentives to enhance its quality of services in content delivery to end users. We find that the effects crucially depend on whether the CP's entry is constrained by the Internet service provider's network capacity. If the capacity is relatively large, the prioritization reduces the investment as CP's investment and prioritization form substitutes. With limited capacity, however, they become complements and the prioritization can facilitate the entry of congestion‐sensitive content. Our analysis suggests that the optimal policy may call for potentially asymmetric regulations across mobile and fixed networks.     

利用网络建立网上技术资料库

网络是高新科技的产物,具有传输信息量大,传输方便快捷的优点,利用它可以实现资源共享。设备类别复杂、型号繁多,其技术资料管理难度极大。利用网络来管理设备技术资料,从而提高设备管理水平,充实管理内容,提高人员素质,完善认知手段,这是设备资料管理的发展方向。     

建立基于Internet的远程设备故障诊断网络

介绍了设备远程监测与诊断的基本概念和系统原理，简述了远程监测与诊断技术的作用和意义，以及要实现远程监测与诊断的关键技术问题。     

Competing through information provision

This paper studies the symmetric equilibria of a two-buyer, two-seller model of directed search in which sellers commit to information provision. More informed buyers have better differentiated private valuations and extract higher rents from trade. When sellers cannot commit to sale mechanisms, information provision is higher under competition than under monopoly. In contrast, when sellers commit to both information provision and sale mechanisms, I identify simple conditions under which sellers post auctions and provide full information in every equilibrium, ensuring that all equilibrium outcomes are constrained efficient. Sellers capture the efficiency gains from increased information and compete only over non-distortionary rents offered to buyers.     

Industry Platforms and Ecosystem Innovation

This paper brings together the recent literature on industry platforms and shows how it relates to managing innovation within and outside the firm as well as to dealing with technological and market disruptions and change over time. First, we identify distinct types of platforms. Our analysis of a wide range of industry examples suggests that there are two predominant types of platforms: internal or company‐specific platforms, and external or industry‐wide platforms. We define internal (company or product) platforms as a set of assets organized in a common structure from which a company can efficiently develop and produce a stream of derivative products. We define external (industry) platforms as products, services, or technologies that act as a foundation upon which external innovators, organized as an innovative business ecosystem, can develop their own complementary products, technologies, or services. Second, we summarize from the literature general propositions on the design, economics, and strategic management of platforms. Third, we review the case of Intel and other examples to illustrate the range of technological, strategic, and business challenges that platform leaders and their competitors face as markets and technologies evolve. Finally, we identify practices associated with effective platform leadership and avenues for future research to deepen our understanding of this important phenomenon and what firms can do to manage platform‐related competition and innovation.     

Competing with complementors: An empirical look at Amazon.com

Research Summary : Platform owners sometimes enter complementors' product spaces and compete against them. Using data from Amazon.com to study Amazon's entry pattern into third‐party sellers' product spaces, we find that Amazon is more likely to target successful product spaces. We also find that Amazon is less likely to enter product spaces that require greater seller efforts to grow, suggesting that complementors' platform‐specific investments influence platform owners' entry decisions. While Amazon's entry discourages affected third‐party sellers from subsequently pursuing growth on the platform, it increases product demand and reduces shipping costs for consumers. We consider the implications of these findings for complementors in platform‐based markets. Managerial Summary : Platform owners can exert considerable influence over their complementors' welfare. Many complementors with successful products are pushed out of markets because platform owners enter their product spaces and compete directly with them. To mitigate such risks, complementors could build their businesses by aggregating nonblockbuster products or focusing on products requiring significant platform‐specific investments to grow. They should also develop capabilities in new product discovery so that they could continually bring innovative products to their platforms.     

Competing internationally through multiple innovative efforts

Increasingly, small firms will be required to compete on international markets in order to grow and survive. This paper reports on a study of 86 small manufacturing firms operating in the metal sector. All firms had adopted one or more advanced manufacturing technology and were considered by the Canadian Association of Manufacturers as process innovative. The basic premise of this research was that in order to compete internationally, a small firm had to develop certain innovative capabilities. These capabilities were not only associated to traditional innovative efforts in R&D and process innovation, but also in supportive organizational capabilities in the form of strategic orientation, technological policy, and technological scanning. Results show that, for these small firms, process innovativeness remains an important competitive factor for international competition and that it is often linked to an aggressive strategic orientation coupled to a short term emphasis on efficiency.     

The Digital Divide and Other Economic Considerations for Network Neutrality

In its 2016 Broadband Report, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recognizes that a rural/urban digital divide remains prevalent—especially with respect to broadband adoption. It also highlights several policies that the FCC has undertaken purportedly to reduce the divide, including the 2015 Open Internet Order (OIO)—in which the stated intent is to enforce “network neutrality.” However, long before the OIO, studies have raised concerns that network neutrality policies will discourage investment by internet service providers (ISPs) in broadband infrastructure, to the detriment of broadband accessibility, and may increase average consumer costs—both of which would only further exacerbate the digital divide. In this paper, we provide a holistic analysis of the effects of net neutrality on the digital divide; in doing so, we draw from recent economic research on this issue. Our goal is to present a range of economic considerations that should be taken into account when evaluating the overall impact of the OIO, with particular attention to its impact on the digital divide.     

Using Conjoint Analysis to Help Design Product Platforms

This article illustrates how one can combine different conjoint analysis studies, each containing a core of common attributes, to help design product platforms that serve as the foundation for multiple derivative products. The illustration is based on actual, but disguised, data from a small company that makes electronic test equipment.
This article demonstrates that decisions that consider products individually are likely to be suboptimal and can be significantly different than those based on product platforms. Suboptimality can occur either when preferences for product features differ across markets or when a technology is more important to the overall company than it is to an individual product. Additionally, we show the importance of considering both fixed and variable costs when performing this type of analysis as sales, contribution, and profit-maximizing products are quite different. Finally, sensitivity analyses show that these results are robust with respect to assumptions about price sensitivity, fixed costs, and timing of entry. © 1999 Elsevier Science Inc.     

Competing buyers,rent extraction and inefficient exclusion

The article illustrates how a seller profitably can prevent entry of a potential competitor, even when entry would increase industry profit. Entry is prevented by offering exclusive contracts to the buyers. The buyers are assumed to be differentiated firms, competing in a downstream market. Exclusion occurs in equilibrium as long as there is some degree of competition among the downstream firms, and even when there are no economies of scale in upstream production.     

Unobserved Heterogeneity in Models of Competing Mortgage Termination Risks

This article extends unobserved heterogeneity to the multinomial logit (MNL) model framework in the context of mortgages terminated by refinance, move or default. It tests for the importance of unobserved heterogeneity when borrower characteristics such as income, age and credit score are included to capture lender-observed heterogeneity. It does this by comparing the proportional hazard model to MNL with and without mass-point estimates of unobserved heterogeneous groups of borrowers. The mass-point mixed hazard (MMH) model yields larger and more significant coefficients for several important variables in the move model, whereas the MNL model without unobserved heterogeneity performs well with the refinance estimates. The MMH clearly dominates the alternative models in sample and out of sample. However, it is sometimes difficult to obtain convergence for the models estimated jointly with mass points.     

Sustainability program brands: Platforms for collaboration and co-creation

While CSR and sustainability have been widely debated topics over the past decades, there is still evidence of unethical practices by businesses, as witnessed through corporate scandals across a number of industry sectors. This highlights the need for firms to collaborate to actively prevent malpractices and instead find ways to improve standards along the whole value chain. With the increased pressure from various stakeholders, calling for firms to address these issues in a collaborative and holistic manner, the development of models facilitating collaboration is vital. Taking a communication perspective, this paper seeks to improve the knowledge on how organisations can manage diverse stakeholders to improve value chain collaboration towards more sustainable practices. Based on a multiple case study methodology, involving in-depth interviews with senior directors in the food and drink value chain, a framework is developed, depicting the value of a branded sustainability program as a useful platform for stimulating collaboration and co-creation from diverse and/or competing stakeholders. The framework builds on, and contributes to several literature strands including CSR/sustainability communication, coopetition and branding.     

如何做好对浅海石油平台应急电源的检验

在紧急状态下,浅海石油平台的应急电源对平台的安全扮演着极其重要的角色,为了增强平台的安全等级,尝试从独立于工程甲乙双方第三方的角度,参照国家、行业的多项标准、规范和工作经验,对在工程设计图纸审查阶段、建造阶段和生产期海洋石油平台应急电源的重点检验内容进行了阐述,其中在图纸审查阶段主要是审查应急电源图纸的科学性、合理性、安全性;建造检验阶段主要是检验应急电源施工的质量、设计图纸的执行情况、国家标准的实施情况及是否对平台的安全构成威胁;生产期检验的主要内容是检查应急电源功能的完整性.