The authors offer a detailed analysis of the coordination costs behind the standardization of 56K modems. They focus primarily on market events and standard-setting activities during early deployment. They argue that the canonical model for a standards war is misleading in the case of 56K. They...

56K modems were introduced under two competing incompatible standards. We show the importance of competition between Internet Service Providers in the adoption process. We show that ISPs were less likely to adopt the technology that more competitors adopted. This result is particularly striking...

We exploit scanner data to track payment choice for grocery purchases for a large panel of households over three years. We show that households focus most of their expenditures on one or at most two of these instruments in choosing between using cash, a check, or a card, and they very rarely...