| 摘要 | The diffusion of innovations is a fundamental aspect of the innovative process, to which
the literature on innovation dedicated a lot of attention. This voluminous literature
covers a variety of themes, such as different kinds of innovations, potential adopters,
and mechanisms by which the innovation spreads among its potential users. However,
some aspects of this vast literature still deserve some further investigation. The
objective of the thesis is to study the adoption and diffusion of a consumer technology,
the portable digital audio player (DAP) market in Europe and Japan. The methodology
is quantitative and consists on the collection and analysis of two original datasets. The
first dataset regards the demand-side consisting in a survey of 1562 young potential
adopters from 9 countries (France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Netherlands, Spain,
Switzerland, UK, and Japan). The other source of data is a dataset of 585 DAPs
marketed between 2001 and 2009, including information on product characteristics
(storage space, size, etc.) and price. The analysis of the data is carried out at three
levels. The first one regards the demand-side, with the aim of assessing how users’
characteristics shape the adoption decision, and providing a classification of potential
adopters that goes beyond the usual classification based on timing of adoption or on
the distribution of a single variable such as income. The second level concentrates on
the supply-side, testing if there is a systematic relationship between product price and
its objectively measurable characteristics and evaluating how technical change in the
sector influences the diffusion path by matching products’ quality change with users’
preferences and patterns of adoption over time. Finally, the third level aims at
providing evidence on whether conventional models of diffusion are able to provide an
adequate explanation of the diffusion of DAPs, and moreover, on how the assumptions
underlying these models might be combined or synthesised into a coherent framework. |
