Jean-Benoit Zimmermann

On the Frontier: Structural Effects in a Diffusion Model based on Influence Matrixes

The aim of this paper is to set the foundation of an approach of the diffusion-adoption problem of an innovation or a technological standard, based on the building of influence matrixes. This means that agents are to be considered as participating in social networks that provide the support and the framework of the adoption-diffusion process.

Social Networks and Economic Dynamics

The object of this chapter is to stress the role of networks as support of economic dynamics and more particularly of cognitive dynamics, focusing on the impact of the topological structures of networks. In a first section we present the remarkable properties of small-world networks in terms of accessibility and connectivity and their consequences in the context of a knowledge-based economy. Then we turn our attention to the larger category of influence networks and their applications to diffusion processes. We introduce social learning in randomly drawn networks, agents modifying the intensity of their links according to the degree of concordance of their state at each period of time. The network structure thus evolves to a critical state where a small number of individuals is capable of triggering large “avalanches” over the network.

'Jamendo: The Heartbeat of Free Music!': Musicians and the Creative Commons

Jamendo is a website for the legal, free downloading of music. This platform of “free” online music, the biggest in the world, operates on the basis of Creative Commons licences. The survey presented here was carried out on a sample of 767 artists (solo musicians or groups) who are members of Jamendo. Our purpose in carrying out this survey was to identify as precisely as possible the characteristics of the artists present on Jamendo and the type of CC licence they choose in order to better understand the motives for their choices. To go further, the question is that of the Jamendo business model from the artists’ point of view. Does Jamendo simply represent a great opportunity for amateurs to showcase their music and win an audience? Or is Jamendo also capable of attracting professional artists, for whom earning an income from their music is essential? To put it another way, the underlying question is whether platforms like Jamendo constitute a possible alternative model for the music industry of tomorrow.

Self Organised Criticality in Economic and Social Networks

Diverse approaches of innovation diffusion, in the presence of increasing returns, have been outlined or explored in the recent literature. We propose, four ourselves, to take into account the idea that agents, in the situation to adopt or not an innovation or a new technological standard, are “situated” within a social network, that is the support of influence effects. Our approach aim is here to explore the role of learning processes into the propagation dynamics within a network structure. In a recent model, formally represented by a neural network, we have introduced a relational learning that constitutes a way to set up an endogenous network evolution. We prove the existence of a self organised criticality phenomenon, where some agents acquire key-positions within the network that bring them a strong structural capacity of influence over the whole population of potential adopters. In this paper, we study the way how network auto-organisation can lead, under given conditions, to a critical state characterised by macroscopic effects generated from microscopic impulses at the level of the individual agent. It is the peculiar structure of those critical networks that allow macroscopic “avalanches” to take place, on which the diffusion process is likely to lean. We analyse the way learning leads endogenously to such a critical state and how it strikes against the finite size of the network.