Increasing the Diffusion of Communication Standards - A General Simulation Framework from the Vendor’s Perspective

This paper addresses to which extent the potential adopters’ influence varies regarding the success of a communication standard during the diffusion. We take the perspective of the standards supplier, and examine how to identify the “strategically” most important actors. Those actors could be addressed with focused initiatives, e.g., specialized advertising or price discounts in order to ensure that they choose the “right” standard. Our research is based on the established decentralized Standardization Problem (SP) and we use a simulation-based approach. We conclude that the extent to which the influence on the diffusion of a communication standard varies, depends highly on the concrete cost and utility constellations. Another result is that there are various situations in which it is not the best choice to “persuade” the actor who exchanges the most information with the other actors to adopt the communication standard. Based on this observation, we propose the “surprise heuristic”, which can support the standard’s supplier in identifying important actors.