Innovation incentives and competition in the hard disk drive industry

Firms in the hard disk drive industry are continually engaging in R & D and improving the quality of their products. We explore various determinants of the product innovation incentives for firms concerned with both their static and expected future profitability. We estimate the observed innovation outcomes as a function of market condition variables which have significant impact on innovation decisions. In addition, we estimate logit utilities that describe the marginal willingness to pay for quality improvements. One aspect of utility is that the willingness to pay for faster access time to data may be initially low but increases over time. The firms' decisions to introduce faster access time are partly motivated by dynamic considerations.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Wu, Xiaohua Sherry

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Panle Jia Barwick and Stephen P Ryan.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/69479

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/69479