Technological Diffusion with Social Learning
认为创新扩散缓慢源于采纳过程中的信息外部性：企业通过观察其他企业的采纳经验来学习，导致所有企业都希望别人先采纳，从而引发等待竞赛，造成采纳时间错开，扩散速度由创新特征和学习过程内生决定。
This paper attributes the slow diffusion of innovations to an informational externality in the process of their adoption. When a new technology arrives its profitability is uncertain but each firm can learn progressively through observing the adoption experience of other firms. Given this prospect of social learning, every firm would prefer that other firms adopt before it does because this enables a better-informed adoption decision. In the absence of explicit coordination, the firms could end up in a sequence of waiting contests; this results in staggered adoptions even when all firms are ex-ante identical. The pace of diffusion is determined endogenously in this model and shown to depend on the characteristics of the innovation and of the learning process.