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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:554808 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Camerani, Roberto |
| Publisher | University of Sussex |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/40051/ |
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