摘要：Firms faced with the decision of whether to standardize or not prior to
introducing a new network technology face a tradeoff: Compatibility improves the
technology’s chances of consumer acceptance, but it also means having to share
the resulting profits with other sponsors of the standard. In this paper, we
show that even prior to market introduction of a new technology, the timing of
decisions is important and that firms have to weigh up the cooperative and
competitive elements of pre-market choices. We also show that the option to
precommit to a technology before it is fully developed (as has been the case
with the Compact Disc) can be profitable for network technologies.
