The Speed of Innovation Diffusion

Itai Arieli (), Yakov Babichenko (), Ron Peretz () and H. Peyton Young ()
Additional contact information
Itai Arieli: Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion–Israel Institute of Technology
Yakov Babichenko: Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion–Israel Institute of Technology
Ron Peretz: Department of Economics, Bar Ilan University
H. Peyton Young: London School of Economics and Nuffield College, University of Oxford

No 2018-W06, Economics Papers from Economics Group, Nuffield College, University of Oxford

Abstract: New ways of doing things often get started through the actions of a few innovators, then diffuse rapidly as more and more people come into contact with prior adopters in their social network. Much of the literature focuses on the speed of diffusion as a function of the network topology. In practice, however, the topology may not be known with any precision, and it is constantly in flux as links are formed and severed. Here we establish an upper bound on the expected waiting time until a given proportion of the population has adopted that holds independently of the network structure. Kreindler and Young [33, 2014] demonstrated such a bound for regular networks when agents choose between two options: the innovation and the status quo. Our bound holds for directed and undirected networks of arbitrary size and degree distribution, and for multiple competing innovations with different payoffs.

Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2018-12-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/economics/Papers/2018/2018W06_ID5.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nuf:econwp:1806

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Papers from Economics Group, Nuffield College, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Maxine Collett ().