  Many natural, physical and social networks commonly exhibit power-law degree
distributions. In this paper, we discover previously unreported asymmetrical
patterns in the degree distributions of incoming and outgoing links in the
investigation of large-scale industrial networks, and provide interpretations.
In industrial networks, nodes are firms and links are directed
supplier-customer relationships. While both in- and out-degree distributions
have "power law" regimes, out-degree distribution decays faster than in-degree
distribution and crosses it at a consistent nodal degree. It implies that, as
link degree increases, the constraints to the capacity for designing, producing
and transmitting artifacts out to others grow faster than and surpasses those
for acquiring, absorbing and synthesizing artifacts provided from others. We
further discover that this asymmetry in decaying rates of in-degree and
out-degree distributions is smaller in networks that process and transmit more
decomposable artifacts, e.g. informational artifacts in contrast with physical
artifacts. This asymmetry in in-degree and out-degree distributions is likely
to hold for other directed networks, but to different degrees, depending on the
decomposability of the processed and transmitted artifacts.
