Technological Choice in Voluntary Standards Committees: An Empirical Analysis.

Vendors frequently compete to have their technology adopted as part of a voluntary consensus standard. In this paper we report the results of an empirical study of the factors that influence the choice of technologies in voluntary technical standards committees. Participation in standards committees is viewed as an aspect of the product development process of corporations involved in markets where network externalities are present. The factors hypothesized to affect the technology decision are: the market power of the coalition sponsoring the technology, the installed base of the products containing the technology, the size of the firms that make up the coalition, the promotional activities of the sponsors (such as technical contributions submitted), the perceived superiority of the technology, and the political skills of the coalition. These hypotheses were tested by collecting data concerning specific technical decisions that were made in several standards committees in the area of computer communicatio...

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