Epidemics vs information cascades

As I was looking at publishers’ websites for my New Year round up of forthcoming books, I noticed OUP billing Paul Geroski’s The Evolution of New Markets as due out in January 2018. This is odd as it was published in 2003, and Paul died in 2005; it isn’t obvious why there’s a reprint now. He was Deputy Chairman and then Chairman of the Competition Commission during my years there, and was a brilliant economist as well as a wonderful person. I learnt an amazing amount from being a member of his inquiry team.

Anyway, the catalogue entry for the reprint sent me back to my copy of the book, along with Fast Second, which Paul co-authored with Constantinos Markides. Fast Second challenges the received wisdom of first mover advantage: Amazon was not the first online books retailer, Charles Schwab not the first online brokerage, and so on. The opportunity lies in between being early in a radical new market and being late because a dominant design and business model have already emerged. The Fast Second business competes for dominance – and supposed first mover advantages are usually fast second advantages.

Paul’s book The Evolution of New Markets – in which I found a handwritten note he’d sent me with it, which made for an emotional moment – does what it says, and explores models of innovation diffusion – so in other words, models of S-curves. His view was that the epidemic model of S-curves, which seems to be the standard one, was a misleading metaphor. He argued that information cascades best fit the observed reality. The epidemic model assumes that a new technology is adopted as information about it is diffused. Each user passes on the info to the next user. However, as the book points out, information diffuses far faster than use. Users need to be persuaded rather than just informed.

More appropriate is a model whereby new technologies arrive in a number of variants at slightly different times, making adoption risky and costly – especially when there are network externalities or when people realize there is going to be a standards battle. Most new products fail, after all. But once one variant starts to dominate, the cost and risk decline and adoption will occur much faster.

It’s a persuasive argument, and a very readable book. Although the list price is surprisingly high for a short paperback, one can be confident second hand copies are just as good.

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