This paper explains why firms with identical opportunities may use different technologies and offer different wages. Our key assumption is that workers must engage in costly search in order to gather information about jobs (Stigler, 1961). In equilibrium, some firms adopt high fixed cost, high...

"This paper proposes a tractable model to study the equilibrium diversity of technological progress and shows that equilibrium technological progress may exhibit too little diversity (too much conformity), in particular, foregoing socially beneficial investments in "alternative" technologies...