The paper traces the rise and decline of solar cell commercialization efforts during the 1970s and early 1980s in the United States. It shows how technology policies for photovoltaic appliances gained and lost support in a time of increasing uncertainty about future resource supplies and the...

Path dependence as a concept in institutional theories has become increasingly popular in economics and other social sciences. The key idea is that in a sequence of events, the latter events are not (completely) independent from those that occurred in the past. Yet, common usage of the concept...

The concept of path dependence is being used in highly deterministic ways in neo-institutionalist analysis, so that studies using this framework have dif.culty in accounting for, or predicting, change. However, the original Polya urn model from which pathdependence theory draws predicts that...