  We examine the effect of spatial bias on a nonequilibrium system in which
masses on a lattice evolve through the elementary moves of diffusion,
coagulation and fragmentation. When there is no preferred directionality in the
motion of the masses, the model is known to exhibit a nonequilibrium phase
transition between two different types of steady states, in all dimensions. We
show analytically that introducing a preferred direction in the motion of the
masses inhibits the occurrence of the phase transition in one dimension, in the
thermodynamic limit. A finite size system, however, continues to show a
signature of the original transition, and we characterize the finite size
scaling implications of this. Our analysis is supported by numerical
simulations. In two dimensions, bias is shown to be irrelevant.
