The industrial district and cluster literature has generated an extraordinary quantity of articles, debates and topics for discussion, and encompasses one of the most vibrant lines of research in the field of economics, geography, management and related disciplines. The literature, however, is fairly fragmented. In this paper, “bibliometric” methods are used to analyse the cluster literature published between 1957 and 2014 in order to explore “prospective” research priorities through the method of “bibliographic coupling”. Beyond focusing on foundational works in the past, this approach shifts the focus away from the practice of analysing co-citations and seminal contributions to one of looking at current and emerging trends in the literature. Using the ISI Web of Knowledge (Web of Science) as a database, an examination of two samples of 3955 and 2419 articles is made. Results reveal the existence of sub-fields of inquiry that follow their own particular research agendas, which remain distinct yet interconnected to one another.
This paper proposes a methodological architecture to integrate Q-learning into economic modelling systematically. It addresses a common gap: the lack of a shared framework linking economic foundations to Reinforcement Learning components. Rather than introducing a new algorithm, it specifies and reports how preferences, frictions, information structures, and time horizons map to the reward function, discount factor, and learning environment design. Equilibrium outcomes serve as benchmarks for comparing learned policies, not as imposed axioms. This approach interprets learning dynamics through standard economic categories and enables comparability across studies. The architecture organizes models along explicit dimensions: behavioural preferences, institutional frictions, economic environment class, information structure, learning and exploration mechanisms, and evaluation metrics. A simulation illustrates how variations in frictions, risk attitudes, and intertemporal preferences affect learned policies, their stability, and their relationship to static benchmarks. The paper aims to promote the cumulative use of Reinforcement Learning in applied economics by providing a general specification that improves interpretability, comparability, and reproducibility, turning deviations from theoretical equilibria into measurable diagnostics that refine economic fundamentals.