Technology and production networks | Research

Technology is central to understand production processes. This research area studies technology and its sole in production networks from different perspectives. A part of this work (with Hardik Rajpal) develops information-theory methods to measure how sophisticated technologies are. Another part (with Tuong Vu) builds models of production networks that are agnostic of particular types of technologies in terms of needing to specify production functions to make them solvable. This is a growing work stream so more publications will be posted soon.

Synergistic small worlds that drive technological sophistication

Published on: 2023

Measuring technological sophistication is quite a challenging problem. In this project, we use the concept of synergistic information as an analogue to economic complementarity between inputs in a production process. Then, we adapt information-theory methods to provide a data-driven framework to measure how complementary are two inputs and to discover the networked structure behind technological sophistication.