Standard Setting Committees: Consensus Governance for Shared Technology Platforms

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Simcoe, Timothy
• 署名单位: Boston University; National Bureau of Economic Research
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0002-8282
• DOI: 10.1257/aer.102.1.305
• 发表日期: 2012
• 页码: 305-336
• 关键词: intellectual property-rights; COORDINATION; COMPETITION; strategies; INNOVATION; patents; models

摘要

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.