Catherine Tucker, MIT Sloan School of Management
Catherine Tucker, MIT Sloan School of Management
Seeding the S-Curve? The Role of Early Adopters in Diffusion
Seeding the S-Curve? The Role of Early Adopters in Diffusion
Abstract: In October 2014, all 4,494 undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were given access to Bitcoin, a decentralized digital currency. As a unique feature of the experiment, students who would generally adopt first were placed in a situation where many of their peers received access to the technology before them, and they then had to decide whether to continue to invest in this digital currency or exit. Our results suggest that when natural early adopters are delayed relative to their peers, they are more likely to reject the technology. We present further evidence that this appears to be driven by identity, in that the effect occurs in situations where natural early adopters’ delay relative to others is most visible, and in settings where the natural early adopters would have been somewhat unique in their tech-savvy status. We then show not only that natural early adopters are more likely to reject the technology if they are delayed, but that this rejection generates spillovers on adoption by their peers who are not natural early adopters. This suggests that small changes in the initial availability of a technology have a lasting effect on its potential: Seeding a technology while ignoring early adopters’ needs for distinctiveness is counterproductive.
This paper is co-written by Christian Catalini, also of the MIT Sloan School of Management. The paper is available for download here.
Bio: Catherine Tucker is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management Science and Professor of Marketing at MIT Sloan. She is also Chair of the MIT Sloan PhD Program. Her research interests lie in how technology allows firms to use digital data to improve their operations and marketing, and in the challenges this poses for regulations designed to promote innovation. She has particular expertise in online advertising, digital health, social media, and electronic privacy. Generally, most of her research lies in the interface between marketing, economics, and law. She has received an NSF CAREER Award for her work on digital privacy, the Erin Anderson Award for Emerging Marketing Scholar and Mentor, the Paul E. Green Award for contributions to the practice of Marketing Research and a Garfield Award for her work on electronic medical records. Tucker is Co-Editor of Quantitative Marketing and Economics and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She teaches MIT Sloan’s course on Pricing and the EMBA course “Marketing Management for the Senior Executive.” She has received the Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching as well as being voted “Teacher of the Year” at MIT Sloan. She holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University, and a BA from the University of Oxford.
A buffet lunch will be available at 11:45 a.m., and the seminar will begin at 12:00 p.m.
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