Technological and economic issues in the logistics of digital products [electronic resource]
說明
108 p
附註
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 61-01, Section: A, page: 0251
Supervisors: Andrew B. Whinston; Jan Stallaert
Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Texas at Austin, 1999
As economic activity becomes more pervasive in the digital realm, the logistics of procurement and assembly of components into digital products and their delivery will exert a crucial impact on industrial organization of firms and the underlying technology. The four essays in this dissertation explore the technological and economic issues in the logistics of digital products. From an economic viewpoint, network resource allocation for the delivery of inelastic digital products and the likely structure of digital product firms are investigated. From a technological viewpoint, the technological requirements for facilitating such resource allocation mechanisms and logistics frameworks are outlined, and thence, candidate technologies that could facilitate sustainable and scalable business infrastructure are illustrated
The specific problem of facilitating commercial delivery of rich content through unicast distribution is addressed in the first essay. The end-to-end quality of service requirements of such distribution necessitate resource allocation mechanisms ensuring virtual connections over the connectionless Internet. Current technological protocols need to be complemented by economic allocation schemes that would account for the interaction of multiple economic agents. A market mechanism based on combinatorial double auctions is outlined to facilitate reservation of resources along virtual connections, and computational experiments are conducted to validate its feasibility. The model is decomposed into a multiple domain version to reflect the hierarchical topology of the Internet, and is supplemented with a system of incentive compatible contracts
Shared distribution is introduced as a scalable paradigm for delivery of rich content, and reliable multicast is proposed as a candidate technology that can support this paradigm. The distribution framework entails local public goods problems which are sought to be addressed by a novel business strategy of competing Internet Service Providers (ISPs), specializing in bundled content targeted to interest groups. This framework is followed up by a resource allocation model for reliable multicast and efficient heuristics are derived to solve the problem for a single domain. The final essay discusses intermediaries providing customized bundles of reusable components. The technological requirements would include interoperable interface specification languages for components, seamless user interfaces that can automate customization, and catalogue systems that can access distributed and diverse inventories. The possible structure of the future digital product firms is investigated against this context, and a semantic information structure is described as the required technological basis to faciliate a market-oriented component economy. The technological framework is illustrated with examples using XML as a candidate technology
