ABSTRACT
During the dot-com boom a coterie of influential economists argued that the new technologies and changes to systems of production, distribution, and exchange required entirely new ways of thinking about valuation, pricing and modelling (Dixit and Nalebuff, 1991; Varian and Shapiro, 1998). A lot of attention was placed on supposedly transformative developments such as the move to “close-to-zero” costs of reproduction, dynamic network economies of scale, the role of strategies in game theory, and heterogeneous agent-based modelling. Nowadays, with the on-going revolution in information and communication technology, commentators are talking in much the same manner about the “internet-of-things”, which enables communication to occur amongst and between businesses, suppliers, consumers or end-users, and machines, in the context of a constellation of technological advances referred to as the new digital economy (Teece, 2012–2013), or the “fourth industrial revolution” (as it has been called in Germany since 2010).
