ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book addresses policy aspects of networks. The conventional way to define networks is in terms of nodes and links. These notions suffice to analyze structure and form of networks in a graph theoretical context but still leave many aspects of networks uncovered. Nodes in networks can have quite different meanings including individuals in social networks, universities in knowledge networks, firms in economic networks, cities in transport networks, airports in aviation networks. The public good feature of networks is still often mentioned as a major reason for government involvement in network markets. The aim of the model experiments is to investigate how the attributes ‘distance’, ‘time’, and ’cost’ influence the performance of the traditional logit model and the neural network model.
