TITLE:
Internet as a Growing and Dynamic Network: An Economic View
AUTHORS:
Pasquale Lucio Scandizzo, Alessandra Imperiali
KEYWORDS:
Network Analysis, Internet, Social Networks
JOURNAL NAME:
Communications and Network,
Vol.6 No.2,
May
8,
2014
ABSTRACT: The past
few decades have witnessed renewed interest and research efforts on the part of
the scientific community. After spending decades to disassemble nature,
focusing the attention on its components, scientists have shifted their
attention on complex networks. These basic structures constitute a wide range
of systems in nature and society, but their design is irregular, evolves dynamically
over time and their components can fit in a large multiplicity of alternative
ways. Nevertheless, the most recent studies of networks have made remarkable
progresses by investigating some critical issues of structure and dynamics,
thereby improving the understanding of the topology and the growth processes of
complex networks. From an economic point of view, networks are especially
interesting because they can be considered as a problem of allocation of a
critical resource, information, under multiple constraints. They can also be
viewed as forms of poliarchies that reproduce, for many aspects, the market
paradigm, with surprising properties of self-organization and resilience, which
go much beyond the characteristics that are generally attributed to general
equilibrium structures. In this paper we first address the major results
achieved in the study of complex network and then focus our attention on two
specific, highly dynamic and complex networks: Internet and the World Wide Web.