As social beings, humans are not living in isolation but rather interact and communicate within their social network via language, meant to convey parts of some conceptualization from the sender to a single recipient or a set of recipients. Communities of agents not only share a common language but also the individual conceptualizations of the world (real and abstract) have to overlap to a significant extent, allowing for efficient reference to whole conceptual structures like "the German constitution", "game theory" or "medical sciences". For "societies" of interacting technical devices or software agents the situation is not quite as Babylonian since although these agents are meant to act individually (and also have a private state and private knowledge) in most cases they are designed to refer to one common ontology or standardized protocol and thus do not have to deal with misunderstanding. However, the more these systems become interconnected, the more this situation resembles the one described for societies of human agents even though the misunderstanding might be easier to detect when the different reference ontologies are made explicit and published. Obviously, in both cases standardization of a common language or set of rules for interaction reduces the individual degree of freedom for the sake of compatibility and benefits derived from interaction. In his work, Falk Graf von Westarp addresses the software market as a domain strongly depending on compatibility effects of the individuals' decisions.

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Authors and Affiliations

TMP Worldwide/Monster, Wiesbaden, Germany

Falk Graf Westarp

Bibliographic Information

Book Title: Modeling Software Markets
Book Subtitle: Empirical Analysis, Network Simulations, and Marketing Implications
Authors: Falk Graf Westarp
Series Title: Information Age Economy
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-57377-4
Publisher: Physica Heidelberg
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive
Copyright Information: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-7908-0009-8Published: 22 January 2003
eBook ISBN: 978-3-642-57377-4Published: 06 December 2012
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 208
Topics: The Computer Industry, IT in Business, Marketing

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

Front Matter

Back Matter

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