Heterogeneity vs. externalities in technological competition: A tale of possible technological landscapes

Jean-Michel Dalle

Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 1997, vol. 7, issue 4, 395-413

Abstract: The article presents a stochastic interaction model based on Gibbs random fields to analyze technological competition in a population of heterogeneous adopters with local or global externalities. The relationships between both heterogeneity and externalities and imperfect and asymmetric information are first emphasized. When local externalities and heterogeneity coexist, the technological landscapes of the industry are then shown to depend on the relative influence of these two parameters, with a phase transition: technologies coexist either in approximately equal market shares when heterogeneity is high enough or with one of the technologies only surviving in technological niches when local externalities dominate. Niches do also spontaneously appear: technological options survive in economic space due to the existence of some amount of heterogeneity among agents. On the contrary, when global externalities are added, pure standardization almost always occurs. We finally argue that different public policies should be designed so as to fit with different technological landscapes.

Keywords: Externalities; Heterogeneity; Local interactions; Global interactions; Phase transition; Standardization; Stochastic models; Technological competition; Technological niches; Economic landscapes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C00 O33 R10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997-12-12
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00191/papers/7007004/70070395.pdf (application/pdf)
http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/0019 ... 07004/70070395.ps.gz (application/postscript)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted

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:spr:joevec:v:7:y:1997:i:4:p:395-413

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/191/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Evolutionary Economics is currently edited by Uwe Cantner, Elias Dinopoulos, Horst Hanusch and Luigi Orsenigo

More articles in Journal of Evolutionary Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().