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Over time, as networks reach monopoly or near-monopoly status, they must wrestle with the issue of how to create more value than they capture—how much value to take out of the ecosystem, versus how much they must leave for other players in order for the marketplace to continue to thrive.

Similarly, robots seem to have accelerated Amazon’s human hiring. From 2014 through 2016, the company went from having 1,400 robots in its warehouses to 45,000. During the same time frame, it added nearly 200,000 full-time employees. It added 110,000 employees in 2016 alone, most of them in its hig…

These firms thus use technology to eliminate the jobs of what used to be an enormous hierarchy of managers (or a hierarchy of individual firms acting as suppliers), replacing them with a relatively flat network managed by algorithms, network-based reputation systems, and marketplace dynamics. These…