Market growth is driven by product innovation. Beyond functional satiation the marginal utility of product performance and variety decreases. We argue that social comparisons underlying innovation diffusion results in consumer motivations for upward assimilation toward the behavior of better...

Boundedly rational consumers rely on their social environment as a source of information. Drawing upon psychological theories about social comparison processes, we hypothesize that social reference groups underlie market segments. New reference groups can emerge from social comparison processes,...

This paper develops an extended version of the quality-ladder model by allowing for heterogeneous markets. Based on this model, it presents an empirical analysis of innovation-based growth at the market level using a technometric measurement concept. It can be shown that a growth-promoting...

Measuring the output of men and women in science and technology has previously been mostly restricted to case studies or small-scale surveys. Based on an analysis of patent and publication databases, this paper applies a methodology to systematically assign the gender to the names of inventors...

Dietmar Harhoff, LMU und Expertenkommission Forschung und Innovation, sieht Handlungsbedarf bei der Innovationsfinanzierung und im Wissens- und Technologietransfer. Da Deutschland zu sehr auf inkrementelle und zu wenig auf radikale Innovationen setze, sollte das Steuersystem „eigenkapital- und...