Intervention versus Inter-Platform Competition: Strategic Industrial Policy and Standardisation
In an attempt to reproduce the skyrocketing growth of the GSM standard, "standardisation" turned into a buzzword of many innovation and industrial policy documents. This paper critically discusses the potential for using standards as a policy tool by providing an overview of the complexity of settin...| Link(s) zu Dokument(en): | WIFO Publikation |
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| Veröffentlicht in: | Austrian Economic Quarterly |
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| Format: | article |
| Sprache: | Englisch |
| Veröffentlicht: |
2013
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| Zusammenfassung: | In an attempt to reproduce the skyrocketing growth of the GSM standard, "standardisation" turned into a buzzword of many innovation and industrial policy documents. This paper critically discusses the potential for using standards as a policy tool by providing an overview of the complexity of setting standards faced by policy makers. While privately established standards bring with them the risk of standard wars, public standardisation faces rather the challenge of making the right technological choice. Based on industrial economic mechanisms we propose a set of criteria that standardisation authorities should consider when launching a standard. The results indicate that many standards tend to emerge automatically, and that the role of standard setting institutions is rather to re-confirm existing market trends. |
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