Adoption Curves and Social Interactions

William Brock and Steven Durlauf

No 15065, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper considers the observational implications of social influences on adoption decisions for an environment of perfect foresight adopters. We argue that social influences can produce two observable effects: 1) discontinuities in unconditional adoption curves and 2) pattern reversals in conditional adoption curves, in which earlier adoption is found for one group of actors versus another when "fundamentals" suggest the reverse ordering should occur; in turn the presence of either of these features can, under weak assumptions, be interpreted as evidence of social influences. As such, these properties are robust implications of social effects.

JEL-codes: C1 D01 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-net
Note: EFG TWP
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as William A. Brock & Steven N. Durlauf, 2010. "Adoption Curves and Social Interactions," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 8(1), pages 232-251, 03.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15065.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:nbr:nberwo:15065

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15065

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().