Objective
This project studies the international adoption process of high technology products with indirect network effects. The term indirect network effect refers to the increased utility of a hardware product as the availability of software increases. In turn, the provision of new software products is encouraged as more and more people adopt the hardware product (see e.g. Cottrell and Koput, 1998). Examples of such products are PCs and software applications, DVD-players and DVD movies, or smartphones and applications. The project tries to find an answer to the question why the adoption of high tech products with indirect network effects is much faster in some countries than in others. One could think of many potential explanation, including the economic situation of a country as well as its cultural, political or geographic situation. It is important, however, both for policy makers as for the industry, to get a better understanding of exactly which factors are important. We propose a new method that is able to identify the main drivers of the international adoption process. This is challenging from a methodological point of view given (1) the feedback relationship between the hardware adoption and the software provision, and (2) the high-dimensional character of the phenomenon. That is, we study the adoption process in an international setting (many countries) and do not want to exclude potential driving factors (many variables).
Fields of science
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
FP7-PEOPLE-2009-IEF
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
MC-IEF - Intra-European Fellowships (IEF)Coordinator
3062 PA Rotterdam
Netherlands