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American Economic Review: Vol. 102 No. 1 (February 2012)

AER Volume. 102, Issue 1 | Previous ArticleNext Article

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Standard Setting Committees: Consensus Governance for Shared Technology Platforms

Article Citation

Simcoe, Timothy. 2012. "Standard Setting Committees: Consensus Governance for Shared Technology Platforms." American Economic Review, 102(1): 305-36.

DOI: 10.1257/aer.102.1.305

Abstract

Voluntary Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs) use a consensus process to create new compatibility standards. Practitioners have suggested that SSOs are increasingly politicized and perhaps incapable of producing timely standards. This article develops a simple model of standard setting committees and tests its predictions using data from the Internet Engineering Task Force, an SSO that produces many of the standards used to run the Internet. The results show that an observed slowdown in standards production between 1993 and 2003 can be linked to distributional conflicts created by the rapid commercialization of the Internet. (JEL C78, L15, L86)

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Download Data Set (2.80 MB) | Online Appendix (228.45 KB)

Authors

Simcoe, Timothy (Boston U)

JEL Classifications

C78: Bargaining Theory; Matching Theory
L15: Information and Product Quality; Standardization and Compatibility
L86: Information and Internet Services; Computer Software