Crowding,satiation, and saturation: The days of television series' lives

The performance of firms depends not just on the structure of the industries in which they compete but also on their relative positioning within those industries, in terms of operating within particular niches. We propose that demand for these niches depends endogenously on the historical ecology of the products offered: Niches become saturated—reduced in their ability to support products—as a large number of previous offerings allows the audience to satisfy its desire for products of a particular type. Analyzing the survival rates of television series aired in the United States from 1946 to 2003, we found that the survival rates of future entrants fell with the extensiveness of recent offerings in the niche, and that the negative association between crowding and survival also weakened with this saturation. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Heterogeneity vs. externalities in technological competition: A tale of possible technological landscapes

The article presents a stochastic interaction model based on Gibbs random fields to analyze technological competition in a population of heterogeneous adopters with local or global externalities. The relationships between both heterogeneity and externalities and imperfect and asymmetric information are first emphasized. When local externalities and heterogeneity coexist, the technological landscapes of the industry are then shown to depend on the relative influence of these two parameters, with a phase transition: technologies coexist either in approximately equal market shares when heterogeneity is high enough or with one of the technologies only surviving in technological niches when local externalities dominate. Niches do also spontaneously appear: technological options survive in economic space due to the existence of some amount of heterogeneity among agents. On the contrary, when global externalities are added, pure standardization almost always occurs. We finally argue that different public policies should be designed so as to fit with different technological landscapes.     

Competing in the looking‐glass market: imitation,resources, and crowding

I examine two dominant processes of organizational interdependence—imitation and resource competition—and develop a theory that integrates predictions about firms' propensity to change market locations based on both. The cornerstone of the model is the argument that both processes operate concurrently and are driven by the departure of peer firms from a shared resource space. I also argue that the imitation effect, which reflects shared perceptions and interpretations among ecologically proximate peers, hinges on the competitive intensity faced by each individual organization in its market location. Analyses of U.S. automobile manufacturers' moves between the industry's three main market segments confirm the predictions of the theory and point to the merits of using an ecological approach to the evolution of market segmentation and the formation of industry structure. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Competition in a technological niche: the cars of the future

The notion of ‘niche’ has proved to be useful to account for the emergence of radical innovations. Most studies, however, deal with the development of single emerging technologies. In this paper we address the competition between multiple niche technologies. Within the niche of the ‘car of the future’ two options compete: the battery-electric and the hydrogen car. While both are shielded from regular market forces, they have to compete in terms of R&D funding, supportive regulation and infrastructure build-up. In our case study we trace the competition in terms of design rules and expectations and show how attention for both options has alternated in three phases, which follow the high hopes and subsequent disappointments of the different component technologies. Whereas there is room for simultaneously developed, multiple options at the local level, at the global level attention and expectations seem much more focused on either the one or the other.     

森林生态系统生态补偿标准研究——以伊春林管局为例

通过对生态补偿标准确定依据的比较分析,认为生态补偿应以成本补偿为主,并考虑森林生态区位的重要性,森林生态系统的林分、林龄等自然属性来制定差异化的补偿标准。在运用层次分析法确定生态区位和森林生态效益调整系数的基础上,构建了森林生态系统补偿标准计算模型,并对伊春林管局森林生态系统补偿标准进行了实证研究。     

Changing the rules? Institutional innovation and the diffusion of microgeneration

The paper addresses the question of how institutional change relates to the diffusion of microgeneration energy technologies in the UK, posed in a research project comprising interviews with thirty-one respondents connected with the field of microgeneration in the UK. It analyses the nature of institutional rules in the prevailing regime of electricity generation and in microgeneration niches. It examines how such rules might facilitate systems innovation, or contribute to the maintenance of the prevailing system or partial change. The conclusions of the paper inform and deepen understanding of how conformity to or innovation in institutional rules may hamper or potentially contribute to diffusion of environmentally sustainable microgeneration of energy.     

Policy implications of potential conflicts between short-term and long-term efficiency in CO2 emissions abatement

This paper shows that, under certain conditions (including path dependence and lock-in), policies and measures leading to a cost-effective GHG emissions mitigation in the short term may not allow reaching long-term emissions targets at the lowest possible cost, that is, they might not be cost-effective in the long term. The reason is that, in a situation where currently expensive technologies have a large potential for cost reductions through learning effects and R&D investments, the implementation of incentive-based mitigation policies such as taxes or tradable permits will encourage the adoption and diffusion of currently low-cost abatement technologies, but might not be enough to make attractive the diffusion of expensive ones, which is a necessary condition for these technologies to realise their cost-reduction potential through the aforementioned effects. A simple model and a numerical simulation are provided to show this possible conflict between static and dynamic efficiency, which points out to the need to combine different instruments, some aiming at short-term cost-efficiency (such as incentive-based environmental policy) and others at encouraging dynamic cost reductions (such as technology/innovation policy).     

Is small really beautiful? A review of the concept of niches in innovation

This article reviews the concept of innovation niches through three categories: strategic niche management (SNM), specialised markets and niches formed as a technology declines. In the literature, innovation niches generate interest from both innovation and marketing perspectives. This review focuses predominately on the former from which the niche types have been adopted and analysed. Mostly, contributions since 1980 have been included, representing the period of academic interest in innovative small firms, while both temporal and locational filters were applied to the study. It is noted that SNM has been proposed as a means to protect potentially useful innovations from full market competition, while specialist niches supply technologies to few customers in more stable environments. Incumbent technologies at the stage of decline may also retreat to niches where they can still remain competitive. Finally, it is suggested that further research on innovation niches would extend our understanding of technology dynamics.     

Tourism in Austria a case study of the influence of tourism on ethnic relations

This study discusses the influence of tourism on ethnic relations between two populations in southern Austria. For many centuries the two populations have co-existed in the same geographical area. This co-existence was based on the exploitation of two separate ecological niches in the same environment — trading and farming. With the coming of tourism in the late 1950's, however, both populations are now cooperating and competing within the same ecological niche, tourism. Tourism has led to increased contact between the two groups and greater participation in each other's affairs. This contact and participation in turn has had the effect of breaking down ethnic boundaries which had remained virtually unchanged for over one thousand years prior to the advent of tourism.