Network, Interactions between Economic Agents and Irreversibilities : the Case of the Choice among Competing Technologies

The paper analyses the conditions of emergence and the properties of irreversibility on a network of economic agents facing technological choices among competing technologies. The irreversibility is thus related to the emergence of a single standard. Two broad classes of models are analysed : on the one side, one considers models of “non-localised” agents making their technological choices on networks that are specific markets where the acquisition of goods by an agent cannot be considered independently of the size of the network. The Arthur’s model is the reference model of adoption in such a framework. One the other side, one considers models of “localised” agents, where the neighbourghood structure of a given agent, is actually influencing his technological choice. The reference model of this class is the percolation model.