Stinson Analytical Inc

Reports

Our primary product is platform and network analysis in the form of reports which are available for purchase and download over our secure e-commerce website.  The reports deal with various aspects of platforms and networks and are grouped by subject matter into various series.  Each series and the associated reports are listed and described below.

Each report is designed to cover some useful and logical division of the overall subject area.  However, later reports generally build on the analysis, conceptual framework, terminology and conclusions of earlier reports.  Depending on the topic, readers may not be able to benefit from the analysis in later reports if they have not been exposed to the foundations established in earlier reports.  Feel free to email and ask which reports may be recommended prerequisites for specific reports of interest.

Note that the sale of reports is governed by the Stinson Analytical Reports Licence.

Series #1: Networks & Platforms — The Economics of Order

Much is riding on our ability to understand networks, but they are complex, subtle, and, despite their high profile, widely misunderstood and underappreciated in the press, industry commentary, the public sector and the academic world.

Modern life and the modern economy are ever more reliant on networks.  Networks change society in lasting and disruptive ways.  They absorb enormous investment.  New networks are popular as speculative investments.  Networks are subject to substantial government oversight, whether by means of regulation, antitrust or policy.  

In these circumstances, as investors, managers, policy-makers and regulators, should we expect a poor understanding of networks to be costless?

There has been a failure to grasp the core of networks.  The result is confusion as to what constitutes a network, how networks and platforms differ, what determines the value of a network and what creates stability in a network, among many other areas.  The inevitable result is that decision-makers in both the private and public sectors will misinterpret market conditions, investment opportunities or the market positions of service providers. 

Stinson Analytical is devoted to the idea that both the economics of networks and their wide implications for what are presently considered to be other areas of economics are not even remotely well understood. 

Stinson Analytical decided to start over, to create a simpler, more useful, more fundamental and better unified framework.  As is often the case, clarity reveals many new and unexpected insights.

Our focus in this series is largely on networks and less on platforms, as the individual report descriptions will make clear.  By “networks”, we mean networks in the economic sense and not in the sense of simply a pattern of social relationships (although our work has relevance for social networks).

While economic concepts are used and explained, the emphasis throughout is on simplicity, brevity, logic and qualitative insight.  Only the most basic prior knowledge of economics and finance is needed.  There are six reports in this now completed series.  They are listed below, beginning with the most recent.

Series #2: A World of Order — Applying the Economics of Order

In our first series of reports, Networks & Platforms: The Economics of Order, we developed a new economic framework, one that determines and integrates the source of “order”. The intention in our second series is to apply the framework we developed in the first series to more specific market contexts and to generate insights missed by standard economic theory because of the latter’s failure to address the creation and foundation of order.

The New Economics of Order