Although economic theory suggests that markets may “tip” toward a dominant platform or standard, there are many prominent examples of persistent incompatibility, interplatform competition, and standards proliferation. This paper examines the phenomena of forking, fragmentation, and splintering in markets with network effects. We illustrate several causes of miscoordination, as well as the tools that firms and industries use to fight it, through short cases of standardization in railroad gauges, modems, operating systems, instant messaging, and internet browsers. We conclude by discussing managerial implications and directions for future research.

Critical infrastructure systems are evolving from isolated bespoke systems to those that use general-purpose computing hosts, IoT sensors, edge computing, wireless networks and artificial intelligence. Although this move improves sensing and control capacity and gives better integration with business requirements, it also increases the scope for attack from malicious entities that intend to conduct industrial espionage and sabotage against these systems. In this paper, we review the state of the cyber-security research that is focused on improving the security of the water supply and wastewater collection and treatment systems that form part of the critical national infrastructure. We cover the publication statistics of the research in this area, the aspects of security being addressed, and future work required to achieve better cyber-security for water systems.

Digitization has drastically lowered the costs of replicating and distributing music, enabling piracy on the demand side, as well as supply side re-use and recontextualization. This paper examines cumulative creativity and re-use through the release of derivative works in the popular music industry. Combining novel data on "digital sampling" and cover songs with a new proprietary Spotify data-set tracking online music streaming, I study how the introduction of a derivative work impacts the market for the underlying good upon which it is based. With my data-set covering 11,682 artists and their daily streaming demand between 2015 and 2016, I utilize a matched-sample difference-in-differences estimator to find that, on average, re-use causes a 3% increase in demand for the treated artists. This effect is significantly mediated by prominence -with the effect neutralized for highly prominent artists, while artists of low prominence have a larger 6% boost in listening. Novel re-uses of artists that have not been subject to extensive past re-use appear to have the largest effect, resulting in an average 15% increase in online streaming. These results highlight an advertising effect of re-use, suggest that derivative works have limited ex post competition with upstream works, and point toward the potential benefits of permissive intellectual property rights licensing.

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