"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...

Innovation has traditionally been seen as the province of producers. However, theoretical and empirical research now shows that individual users – consumers – are also a major and increasingly important source of new product and service designs. In this paper, we build a microeconomic model...

The impact of user innovation on social welfare isanalyzed by comparing user innovators to manufacturer innovators in terms oftheir innovation incentives and knowledge.Following a review of theliterature on product development by users, it is argued that the introductionof user innovation in a...