THE DYNAMICS OF ADOPTION, COORDINATION AND DIVERSITY - ON THE DIFFUSION OF TECHNOLOGICAL STANDARDS

While acknowledging their relevance, the article criticizes some models used by modem economics of technical change to study the diffusion of technological innovations and standards, with a special emphasis on W.B. Arthur's Polya urns. Another class of models - stochastic network processes or Gibbs random fields - is suggested and simulation results are presented. As a major conclusion. we are lead to reject the property of uniform lock-in on a single technology. Technologies all survive, however sometimes only in niches, due to coordination phenomena between agents' decentralized decisions and network externalities. We have thus made some new steps toward a proper analysis of technological dynamics.