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BM42232
Evolution and Socio-Economic Impact of Technologies

Standards
Objectives
 Standards: Role of technology standards; Impact of standards on prices and quality;
Impact of standards on market structure and competition; Impact of standards on
technology adoption rates; Technology standards affect economic outcomes

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Standards
 Without a specific institutional structure
 Market might select one or more standards by choosing products (Microsoft’s Windows)
 Only one or a few winners emerge
 Proprietary control
 Likely to lead to large vertically-integrated firms dominating the industry
 Government mandates standards
 TV broadcasting and early mobile telecommunications
 Likely to lead to large vertically-integrated firms dominating the industry
 Standard Development or Standard Setting Organisations (SDOs or SSOs)
 Open standards
 Mainly in telecom standards
 Create opportunities for firms at many different levels of the supply chain

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Standards formation
 Standard setting can be voluntary: where industry participants agree on a process for
collaborating, to various degrees, in developing, establishing and adopting standards
 Standards can be government-mandated: where the national government plays a
central role in the standard development process
 Sometimes, open licenses or proprietary technologies can be adopted as de facto
standards
 The nature of standardization can have a significant impact on the structure of the
industry, its rate of growth and innovation
 Open standards results in more competitive and dynamic markets for innovators and
lower prices and better quality for customers

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Standards formation
 Standards enable compatibility between various participants of the ecosystem, allow for
interoperability of products, wider network effects, and faster advancement of technology by
contributions from a wider pool of innovators
 Mobile telephony standards
 1G: analogue communication standards

 2G: digital transmission; higher quality of voice communication compared to analogue technology

 3g, 4G: increase in quality of voice and data transmission; decline in usage costs

 Television broadcasting: analogue to digital signals; can transmit via cable networks, satellites and
wireless networks
 USA: Government standards: From Radio Corporation of America (RCA) to Columbia Broadcasting
System (CBS) to National Television System Committee (NTSC) standard
 France: Séquentiel Couleur à Mémoire (SECAM). Adopted by Soviet Union and French colonies in
Africa
 Germany and Europe: Phase Alternation by Line (PAL) standard. Adopted by most of Europe

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Standards formation: TV
 Standards were mocked as:
 NTSC: Never Twice the Same Colour
 SECAM: Supreme Effort Contre
Amerique’
 PAL: Provocation Allemande
 CCIR (International Radio Consultative
Committee): political influence prevented
experts to come up with a common
standard

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Standards formation: TV
 Different product standards and the resulting incompatibility prevented customers
from choosing foreign manufacturers’ products
 Invention of integrated circuits in early 1980s eliminated this technical barrier
 In Europe, Japan had to wait for the expiry of the patents of analogue TV standards
and licensing permissions (specifically chosen to protect domestic manufacturers) to
enter the market
 Japan introduced High Definition TV (HDTV) to the global market. This was enhanced
from NTSC. HFTV adoption was slow because high-definition programming was scarce
and the widescreen television sets that employed the standard were too expensive
 US and Europe: delayed approval of Japanese analogue high-definition standard
fearing complete domination of their electronics markets by Japan

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Standards formation: TV
 Europe developed HD-MAC using Eureka 95 project. But adopted PALplus
 HD-MAC was superior but could not achieve success because the interests of satellite broadcasts were
not in line with those of high-definition set manufacturers
 USA: FCC Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service (ACATS) developed digital ATSC system
through the Grand Alliance
 ATSC was developed as replacement for NTSC

 ATSC is adopted by NAFTA countries (US, Canada, Mexico) as well as in El Salvador, Honduras, and
South Korea
 Japan: developed Integrated Systems Digital Broadcasting (ISDB) to replace their analogue high
definition standard
 ISDB is adopted in Japan and South America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru,
Venezuela)

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Standards formation: TV
 Europe: developed DVB standard
 Adopted around the world with all of Europe, Middle East, Central and Southeast Asia, most of
Africa, and Oceania. Also, adopted in Uruguay, Colombia and Panama
 China: developed DTMB based on European DVB

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Standards formation: Mobile Technology
 Late 1970s and 1980s: dominated by monopolies in US, Japan and in Europe
 Only Nordic governments played an ‘accomodating’ role by agreeing to cooperate in
the development of a pan-Nordic system and left the standardization to the public
telephone operators and manufacturers such as Ericsson and Nokia
 Japan: Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) standard in 1979
 US: Analogue Mobile Phone System (AMPS) was developed by AT&T/Bell and
Motorola as the 1G standard
 Europe: Nine competing 1G standards were developed
 Nordic nations: Nordic Mobile Telephony (NMT) standard was introduced in 1981
 NMT’s success encouraged European governments to cooperate on the next
generation of mobile telephony standards

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Standards formation: Mobile Technology
 1985: 20% of the global mobile market was controlled by Nokia and Ericsson
 European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administration) in 1982: 26 countries joined
to ensure that the standardization structures and procedures remain efficient, accountable and
transparent
 CEPT: established 2G GSM group (Groupe Speciale Mobile) in 1982. From there GSM (Global System
for Mobile’ communications (GSM) was formed in 1987
 US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) did not mandate a specific standard in the US and
carriers where free to choose whatever standard they wished. This resulted in the presence of
multiple standards
 Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CITA): Voluntary consortium of major telecom
companies formed in 1985
 IS-386 standard was developed by CITA in 1989. Like European GSM.
 Both standards use Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA)

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Standards formation: Mobile Technology
 CDMA (Code Driven Multiple Access): Developed in 1991 by Qualcomm
 2003: US had equal coverage for CDMA and TDMA standards
 3G specifications were developed by International Telecommunications Union (ITU) under the title
“International Mobile Telecommunications-2000” (IMT-2000)
 3GPP2, another international standards body, developed CDMA2000
 ETSI developed W-CDMA
 Compromise between competing camps was made through coalition of network providers called
“Operators Harmonization Group” (OMG)
 4G: Transition to IMT-Advanced was performed by ITU
 3GPP developed LTE; IEEE developed WiMax; Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology
(MIIT) developed TD-LTE
 4G: ITU recognized LTE and WiMax as 4G technologies; did not satisfy requirements of IMT-Advanced
 Later versions of LTE such as LTE-Advanced was IMT-Advanced compliant
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Standards formation: Mobile Technology
 5G: “Weightless” is a set of open standards developed by a Special Interest Group comprising 1400
members including large firms, such as Qualcomm and Huawei
 “Weightless” standards govern communication between devices – the “Internet of Things” – which builds

on the fifth generation of mobile telephony

 PC technology:
 Intel expected new Windows release to exploit the advancements in semiconductors

 Microsoft released major new version every four to five years

 In contrast to open standards, Microsoft could decide the speed and type of innovation without any

collaboration with others in the value chain

 Smartphone
 Google’s open source Android replaced gradually the dominant O/S sponsors, such as Nokia’s Symbian
and RIM’s proprietary O/S for Blackberry
 Android raised due to its no license fees to handset producers
 “Free” meant “paid in another way”. Google earns through money from advertising
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Standards formation
 Proprietary standards are associated with slower innovation in the associated markets
 Newer technologies, such as cloud computing, have relied on open-source programmes despite the
strong dominance of proprietary software such as Windows in the PC market
 Price levels in standards-reliant technology industries have declined over the last few decades
 Incompatible regional analogue television standards created nontariff barriers to trade in TV sets and,
hence, increased concentration and reduced competition in these products
 Consumer prices for mobile telephony devices have been falling even as the range and quality of
services have massively improved
 The early mobile phone industry had a much worse record of price and performance improvement
 As with the French TV producers, this partial protection from competition was ultimately unsuccessful
 One measure of mobile market prices is the average revenue per user (ARPU) in the retail mobile
market

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Standards formation
 The price of mobile usage has also declined rapidly along with the price of equipment, as in the quality
adjusted producer price index for wireless telecommunications carriers
 For products related to the PC O/S-related industry, prices have fallen rapidly while productivity has
increased, albeit not as quickly as in mobile telecoms
 Open systems lead to faster innovation
 While Apple is perceived to be a highly innovative company despite being a “closed standard”, there
are several other examples of closed IT systems that have failed
 Allowing other suppliers some degree of influence or control over development of the operating
system also resulted in faster innovation, albeit the effect was much less than opening up to the
production of complementary hardware
 The evidence indicates that with standards, prices are lower and the quality is higher. The effect of
standards on price and quality is greater when standards are not fragmented. One reason for this is
that standards can promote market competition, and greater diversity in innovation

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Standards formation
 All three industries – television, mobiles, and O/S – are associated with competitive hardware markets
that implement the standards or design complementary products. Their hardware markets exhibit low
concentration and high entry and exit rates. However, only mobile telephony has a diverse R&D sector
in which smaller innovators can compete to contribute to the standard, whereas the R&D sector for
television and O/S are highly concentrated
 Microsoft ecosystem overall may have been more innovative as well as cheaper because of the large
number of competing hardware producers and applications developers. Windows has prevailed as the
majority PC O/S despite state-sponsored, commercial and open-source challengers
 Upstream market for proprietary O/S is controlled by the firm that owns the O/S. For example,
Microsoft is the sole firm involved in R&D for its O/S
 Digital TV standards: ISDB-T transmission standard patents are owned by ten companies, DVB-T2
patents by seven companies, and ATSC patents by nine companies
 Standardised technology industries lead to unconcentrated downstream industries, where companies
is fierce and entry and exit is frequent

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Standards formation
 For upstream markets:
 With open, voluntary standards, a number of smaller firms can contribute to standards
development without having to take part in the rest of the supply chain. This characteristic of
voluntary open standards leads to a diverse upstream market with a large number of players,
where smaller players are successful in incorporating their technologies in the standard
 There is clearly a general trend towards faster adoption, but the radio and TV industries also
showed faster adoption than several more modern inventions, so there is more to this than
merely a quickening pace of change
 There are several industry-specific and history-specific factors that may influence the adoption of
technologies. Econometric evidence, which controls for these factors, suggests that the pace of
adoption is influenced by the market structure.
 The nature of standardisation can have a significant impact on the structure of the industry, its
rate of growth and innovation.

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Technology standards affect economic outcomes?
 Different firms operating along the supply chain – technology innovators, component manufacturers, handset
producers, app developers and many others – need to agree on technical standards for many reasons, including
allowing their products to work with one another. Without standards this varied ecosystem could not exist
 Some industries – such as pharmaceuticals – have a strong role for IP but make little use of standards. Even if
the industry requires technology standards, they may be proprietary, with ultimate development rights resting
in a single company. This can be effective, but will often lead to monopolization of the market and “standards
wars” between companies seeking such monopolies can lead to inefficient outcomes. Standards developed by
government can also lead to inefficient technological issues, often intended to promote local production
 A technical standard for is a set of specifications such that one product meeting those specifications can be
expected to work with another product that also meet them.
 Generally, these compatible products will be complements, rather than substitutes, in demand. We note
how such standards can allow consumers and producers to take advantage of network effects, resulting
in a more effective and efficient industry. They also affect the industry structure and investment, by
solving potential hold-up problems when investments in complementary products are relation-specific.

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Technology standards affect economic outcomes?
 Two products are complements if demand for one goes up, when the price of another goes down – as
opposed to substitutes, for which demand falls if the price of the other goes down
 Complements might require the presence of one another (electric cars do not work without electricity) or
not (electricity will continue to be sold with or without electric cars).
 It is not at all obvious from the technology, for example, whether Facebook and Twitter are substitutes
(alternative ways of communicating) or complements (people tweet about their Facebook posts)
 Each independent supplier takes no account of any harm to its rival in lost sales from low prices, so it sets
prices lower than would a monopolist of both products, who would care about revenues from both
 When different suppliers price complements independently, the resulting prices are likely to be higher
than would set by a monopolist, for a symmetrical reason
 The multiple components combined into a phone handset are mainly complements and the multiple
technologies combined into a standard will usually be complements too
 Cournot effect: is an economic model describing an industry structure in which rival companies offering
an identical product compete on the amount of output they produce, independently and at the same time

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Technology standards affect economic outcomes?
 “Direct” network effects arise when users value the presence of similar users
 Indirect network effects arise when there are two or more different types of users,
such as consumers and app developers for an operating system, for example
 When network effects are present, standardization is likely to be valuable
 If only indirect network effects are present, suppliers would get less value out of
developing products for many separate markets, could miss out on economies of
scale and competition would be weak between suppliers each specialising in just one
independent customer segment. All of this raises costs and is likely to diminish
technical progress too.

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Technology standards affect economic outcomes?
 Imagine a power company placed near a coal mine to benefit from the production. If the coal mine increases the
price of coal after the power plant is built, what happens next? Right contractual terms between the two companies
is better but the future is uncertain and it might not be possible for the two parties to specify exactly how prices or
other conditions of supply would respond to every eventuality
 Standardisation on a single approach for the entire market is a solution to the problem because investors will
know that their investments will be compatible with and will benefit all actual and potential buyers and
sellers
 Railway gauges are a bit more varied: broader gauges can support larger, faster and more expensive trains,
and require more space for longer curves. This partly explains why there remain multiple gauges, with
narrower gauge for mountain railways, for example, but obviously there are advantages to train operators of
standardisation too.
 Excess inertia: buyers and producers (‘participants’) persist with an inefficient standard even if they would
collectively be better off all shifting to a better, new standard. This occurs because no one participant has the
incentive to do it alone
 Game industry: 1980s dominated by 8-bit Nintendo; Sega and NES introduced 16-bit machines with superior capabilities in
1989; switching only happened in 1991 due to a need for variety of games

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Technology standards affect economic outcomes?
 Excess momentum: the decision of an early adopter causes the market rapidly to lock into a new,
inefficient technology even when a better technology exists
 Stephenson’s narrow rail gauge was recognized as a constraint on engine power and it is generally agreed to be
inefficient standard but it because the most common standard globally as a result of this first move advantage
 Moving from multiple standards to a single standard:
 Costs will tend to increase over time, as more and more investments are made in the “installed base” of each of the
alternative standards
 The benefits of switching to a common standard will often increase over time as well
 Fast-changing technologies like ICT
 Standards not only need to change to reflect continuous technical advances, they also incorporate technical advances
 Pre-existing standards can spur the development and adoption of new technologies: Ex., standards governing ISDN
and wireless telecommunications eased both the development and the diffusion process of SMS text messaging
 The impact of standards on the pace of adoption was found to be stronger if the technology was closely related with
other technological standards and if the technology was radically new

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Technology standards affect economic outcomes?
 Macroeconomic impact of standards
 The wider economy benefits because standards, in the findings of a study of the UK:
 a. help businesses enhance the quality of their products and efficiency of their processes;

 b. reduce the variety of goods and services to an optimal level for minimising costs;

 c. facilitate inter-operability of products and processes; and

 d. efficiently make technical information available to all firms allowing an effective and less costly inter-
firm exchange of information.
 By encouraging innovation and increasing productivity, standards have a positive impact on GDP growth
 The contribution of standards is higher for developed economies with higher standardisation activities such
as Germany, France and the UK. On the other hand, the impact of standards on GDP is lower for countries
with lower standardisation activities (Canada, Australia and Denmark) or emerging economics (China)
 Information standard setting efforts (e.g., through consortia) may also have an additional impact on GDP
growth, but it is hard to measure these standards and therefore still harder to assess the effect on growth

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Technology standards affect economic outcomes?
 Impact on international trade
 Standards set by importing countries that impose requirements on exporters can constrain
imports, for example in agricultural products
 The impact of standards on trade between countries with very different standards regimes can be
negative. Having ISO standard helped exports from developing countries. Having standards not
harmonized to ISO standards, deterred certain imports from Sub-Saharan Africa to Europe.
 Impact on individual businesses
 Standardization contributed to an aggregate increase in Gross Value Added (GVA)

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Standards, trade and development
 A standard opens up markets for complementary products, so the wider the geographic scope of the
standard, the greater the scope for increased competition and innovation as a result of
standardisation. It seems obvious that the unprecedented rate of economic development in Asia over
the past 20 years has a lot to do with the presence of standards, particularly in the IT sector, enabling
specialisation in the manufacture of high technology products even without a domestic R&D base
 Standards change the way firms can interact with Global Value Chains (GVCs). A standard provides
many points at which a producer can contribute value-added, breaking up the supply chain that
otherwise might occur within a vertically-integrated multinational
 A less ‘lumpy’ supply chain – i.e. one in which a producer can participate with a relatively small
investment can – has created new opportunities for participation in hi-technology industries and
illustrates this with examples of East Asian export-led growth
 Before the modern globalization era, for the most part developing countries did not manage to enter
high-technology industries at all. The macro-economic results from emerging economy participation
in global value chains are very clear and very positive indeed for developing countries

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Standards, trade and development
 Good jobs at good wages? Rewards for skill development
 Individuals undertake investments that make them more valuable
 However, whether those workers are themselves able to capture the value of their increased skills
does not depend just upon their productivity but upon how transferable those skills are, to another
employer. If they are specific to the machines and the layout used by only one employer, they are not
so transferable and so there is no competitive constraint upon the employer to reward such skills.
 With standardisation, then, we would expect to see a differential between the wages of experienced
and inexperienced workers, possibly increasing as technology raises the productivity of the former
group
 In a more standardised environment, the rewards to skilled work will be higher, because more of
those skills are potentially transferable to competitors. This does not simply improve the balance of
rewards as far as employees are concerned; by raising the returns available to investing in skills, it
increases value overall. Indeed, if the skilled workers themselves contribute disproportionately to
innovation and economic growth overall, all will benefit.

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Standards, trade and development
 One way in which standards can promote innovation and competition is by enabling specialist firms. Because a
standard enables one product to work with many others (among other benefits), a small producer of
specialized products can access a large market of consumers who need not be technically sophisticated
 Ex., Angry Birds application for Android phone by Rovio Entertainment, a small application developer company in Finland, in
2010
 Indirect benefits do occur due to increased competition
 Standardisation permits a supplier to take advantage of network effects but also potentially increases the
scope of competition between standardized firms
 Deliberate incompatibility can therefore be a tactic to avoid competition
 iPhone charger is costlier than Android charger. This cost differential can be seen as a measure of the
competitive benefits of standardization
 There is probably a quality difference between different chargers, but equally this difference could even
understate the cost differential to the customer, who would not have to buy a new charger for each new
electronic device after standardization. By using standardized interface, the consumer would not be locked
into any particular proprietary solutions and manufacturers would compete on price and innovation.

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Standards, trade and development
 It seems reasonable to suggest that standards that are more open (to be used by producers of
complementary products) will create more innovation than closed systems. Apple operates a largely
closed standard and is often cited as a counterexample
 Overall, Apple has clearly been a highly innovative company but it is an unusual one and there might
perhaps be greater consensus that closed standards harm innovation were it not for this one – very
significant – outlier
 Developing standards: open voluntary processes versus proprietary and government-promoted
standards:
 Costs and benefits to society are not necessarily the same for alternative decisions

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Standards, trade and development
 Broadly speaking, there are three approaches to setting standards:
 Proprietary standards: a firm or a small group of firms has the ultimate power to decide when and
how a standard changes. Proprietary standards are usually de facto standards, emerging from
behaviour in the market.
 Advantage: clear and fast decision from a committee
 Government standards: governments impose technical compatibility standards, whether to favour
domestic firms and state-owned firms or when no industry-agreed solution seems possible.
 Voluntary open standards: an industry body which is open to all industry participants sets the
standard, with some form of committee-based decision-making.

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Proprietary Standards: drawbacks
 They are more likely to lead to inefficient multiple standards in the market, if network externalities are important;
 The existence of multiple standards in a ‘standards war’ of even limited duration can have some adverse effects.
 Such wars can result in the selection of inferior technology. For example, VHS won over Betamax.
 Strong ‘indirect’ network effects, arising from the benefits broadcasters and consumers each receive from
increased numbers of the other on the same standard, made it inevitable that a single standard would emerge.
 Because one standard may be more attractive in the short term but not the best in the long run
 A firm sponsoring a proprietary standard may have weaker incentives for radical innovation than would multiple
firms contributing technology to a standard, because it replaces ‘itself’ rather than potentially replacing a rival.
 Proprietary standards that come to dominate a market are likely to lead to market power, worsening prices and
quality and reducing the speed with which innovations diffuse in the market.
 A proprietary platform sponsor might behave opportunistically, exploiting its superior knowledge of the platform
to displace suppliers of complementary products and thus deterring innovation in the ecosystem or – in some
extreme cases – use its market power directly to exclude them from the market.

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Technology standards affect economic outcomes?
 However, if network effects are weaker or in the absence of government intervention, two or more standards
might persist.
 Multiple incompatible standards that persist could segment the market, having potentially ambiguous effects on
consumer welfare. When a new consumer (or for that matter an application developer) is considering which
product to adopt, the standards are in competition. This will drive them to improve quality, lower price and make
technical progress.
 However, in markets with network effects, the presence of multiple incompatible standards will be inefficient
 Standards war might be that prices during the war fall well below levels that are sustainable, but this by itself
serves to warn that prices in the future will be higher, when the war is over. Very low prices or excessive
advertising and marketing activity during the period of the war might not benefit customers over the longer term.
Furthermore, when the war ends, some customers will have chosen the wrong standard and might need to
purchase replacements, or find themselves without complementary products. If customers have the foresight to
anticipate either of these problems, they might delay taking up either of the competing standards until it is clear
which has won, leading to slow adoption times of new technology

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Technology standards affect economic outcomes?
 Proprietary standards might also lead to slower or less radical innovation, if the standard owner has such an
advantage as not to fear replacement by a new competitor providing the ‘next generation’ of the standard
 A monopolist innovates to replace himself and therefore places a lower value on a disruptive innovation than
would a rival who has nothing to lose
 The owner of the standard has a competitive advantage that derives from its knowledge of the inner details and
the future development plans of that standard
 The power of ultimate decision-making is not always in the standard sponsor’s own interest as it also depends on
the reactions of suppliers of complementary products
 Third party developers might be reluctant to create software that is compatible solely with the proprietary
standard
 Intel does: (a) setting up an internal structure with separate divisional profit and loss to avoid such incentives, (b)
disseminating intellectual property widely to assist entry for complement providers and (c) creating a separate
unit (the Intel Architecture Lab) whose staff are rewarded for promoting the health of the ecosystem as a whole
 Adobe gave PDF (“Portable Document Format”) full specifications as open standard in 2008, which was a
proprietary from 1992

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Government-promoted standards: Disadvantes
 A government may either impose a de jure standard or at least provide a very strong steer towards a
single de facto standard, avoiding the inefficiencies of multiple standards and standards wars within
its own territory. However, standard-setting by national governments or regional bodies may well
result in geographic fragmentation, with multiple national or regional standards.
 In principle, a government could select the optimal standard for the economy and the society, as
governments will not have incentives to promote a given standard that can lead to inferior
technologies. That said, while there are examples of governments supporting success stores, such as
DVB-T, governments might pick the wrong standards because of a lack of technical expertise, or
because they have political motivations to do so, as we shall discuss.
 Again, in principle, a government standard could avoid monopoly and the inefficiencies, slow
innovation, and the possibility of anti-competitive behaviour that it creates. That said, government
standards do often favour particular firms, creating monopolies in markets that might otherwise be
competitive.

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Government-promoted standards
 Government intervention might help focus towards long term issues that might be important
 Governments’ records in ‘picking winners’ is poor, partly because they lack the incentives of a
commercial developer to identify efficient technology
 Government might be a “blind giant”

 Might pay excessive attention to purely technical standards, ignoring some more commercial
considerations
 Government might be influenced by poor information provided by its own lobbyists
 Standard-setting to promote national interests can lead to multiple regional standards, missing out on
the efficiencies and competition available from a global standard.
 They might also choose inferior technology, whether through a lack of technical expertise or a political
motivation, such as protecting the interests of domestic over foreign producers, regardless of which
technology is best.

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Open voluntary standards
 The UK Government defines an open standard for procurement purposes according to six criteria:
 a. Collaboration in a consensus-based decision process;

 b. Transparency in that process;

 c. Due process – the standard is adopted by a specification or standardisation organisation;

 d. Fair access and publicly available at zero or low cost

 e. Market support: the standard is mature and supported by the market; and

 h. Rights are licensed in a royalty free basis that is compatible with both open source and
proprietary licensed solutions.
 Openness in this context relates to the ability to participate in the process
 All participants and managers are volunteers, although their work is usually funded by their
employers or sponsors
 Open standard-setting takes place in formal standard development organisations but also in informal
consortia around those organisations

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Open voluntary standards
 Ideal case: An open standard-setting process can provide a single global standard
 Standard Development Organisations (SDOs) can and do endorse multiple standards; and in some cases, a
standards war is fought in the marketplace while an SDO-based standardization process is under way
 Open standard-setting therefore in no way guarantees acceptance of a standard
 Believed to produce good results than proprietary and government standards
 Selection is based on whether the technologically is well suited to the industry or not
 Selection is a decision-making process based upon voting
 In an open standard-setting process, for example:
 A technical need is identified; and, if agreed by the SDO as a whole, working groups consider how to meet it;
 Technical solutions can be proposed and submitted ahead of the standards meeting, giving participants time to
evaluate the proposal;
 Each proposed solution is presented and discussed in open forum under a neutral chairperson;
 Depending on how the SDO is structured, voting or consensus decision on the basis of technical merit selects
the proposal for the standard.

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Open voluntary standards
 In selecting efficient technologies and then in adding value to that technology by incorporating it in a
standard, SDOs obviously provide incentives for innovation
 Much of the reasoning for how an open standard-setting process results in enhanced incentives for
innovation arises from ‘the market for technology’ that it creates, which depend upon property rights
 Indeed, the majority of participants in SDOs do not themselves put forward technology. They gain
value from the information and networking in the meeting, and the ability to influence the standard,
rather than from innovation. Nor can a standard itself be used anti-competitively to exclude rivals
from an industry as a proprietary standard can be

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General remarks
 Proprietary standards at least have a strong advantage of coherence, and Apple has
produced very innovative products despite its rather closed approach.
 Similarly, we would not want to suggest that compatibility standards imposed by
government are always inefficient. On the contrary, sometimes a government
imposed standard can be necessary to help co-ordinate change, or to deal with
industry incentives that are not aligned with the objectives of the wider economy and
society (the EU’s decision on charger adapters, for example).

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Markets for technology
 Innovations generate value when they are incorporated into a product
 Innovation can also generate value through technology licensing
 Any market for technology will only work effectively if both innovators and implementers have an incentive to take
part
 The balanced incentive for both innovators and implementers will depend on how IPRs are protected and how
payments for licensing technology are set
 There is mixed economic evidence on whether patents or other forms of intellectual property rights are essential
for technical progress
 Larger firms may outweigh secrecy over intellectual property rights
 Smaller firms depend more on intellectual property rights and be made likely to produce radical, disruptive
innovations
 Without IPR, an innovator and an implementer cannot easily exchange knowledge and nor can the innovation
be publicised without losing value. Vertical integration (the business arrangement in which a company
controls different stages along the supply chain) and secrecy can therefore be expected to prevail if IPR
protection is weak.

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Markets for technology
 Creating all the technologies embodied in an industry requires vast array of specialist skills and
somehow organize them to work together to work effectively
 The most famous inventor in US history, Thomas Edison, made significant use of the secondary
market, selling and licensing his patents, particularly in the early part of his career when he is
reported as having passed at least twenty of his patented inventions to third parties. He even assigned
the patent for his incandescent light bulb to the General Electric Company, although Edison also tried
to commercialise the light bulb himself later in his career, as he did his other most notable invention:
the phonograph. However, he might have done better to stick to the secondary market, as his
performance in these business ventures was “dismal”. As his friend Henry Ford noted, Edison was “the
world’s greatest inventor and the world’s worst businessman”

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Licensing through IP
 Without strong IP protection, the best way to guarantee a return on the investment in designing a chip
was to make and sell it. Thus, only vertically-integrated firms can prevail.
 Licensing designs brought two completely new business models:
 ‘Fabless’ R&D outfits, with no manufacturing capability, able to concentrate on the design of chips;
and
 ‘Fabs’: dedicated ‘foundry’ manufacturers, able to manufacture chips based on multiple designs,
either for marketing themselves or on behalf of others.
 Without the market for technology, the industry structure would be much more concentrated because
of the economics of chip manufacture. Manufacturing semiconductors is a hugely capital-intensive
process with very strong economies of scale.
 Macher et al. (1998) report a USD 1 billion capital cost for a large fab.
 Without a market economy in which property rights are respected, the division of labour in production
cannot emerge. Similarly, in R&D, without tradeable property rights in technology, specialist R&D firms
cannot emerge
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Markets for technology
 A common pattern in the development of markets for technology is the provision of generic
technology to replace customized design of individual products
 In early video games, for example, a single team (or even a single programmer) would create the entire
game, whereas today the graphics will typically use a third-party ‘engine’, leaving the game designer to
concentrate on the story and characters
 Outcomes will be uncertain, particularly for those innovations with what Teece (1986) terms ‘weak
appropriability’: when a patent cannot fully specify the value, for example because the innovation
requires market feedback to perfect. The seller might want to reduce this uncertainty by sharing
information about the technology, but this risks the loss of valuable secret information. The
relationship between a developer of technology and potential commercialiser of that technology
cannot be contracted for completely, so if assets are specific to that relationship – rather than being
generic – the obvious solution is to merge.
 Example, Compact Disc Technologies were first released in 1980 and were used as a digital solution
to music storage. Years later, this standard was repurposed for data storage

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Innovations
 The overall share of innovations by large firms is steadily declining
 Modularity trap: no one firm has the ability or incentive to undertake a more radical change,
advancing the technology overall
 Coordination without vertical integration among industries is possible through SDO

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SDOs
 Standard development organisations are very diverse. Some of them are collaborations on a narrow set of
technical specifications and involve only a couple of members, while others have thousands of participants
and oversee multiple standardization activities simultaneously
 The European Commission classifies SDOs into three main categories:
 a. those recognized formally by governmental regulators, e.g. the European Technical Standards
Institute (ETSI), the International Standards Organisation (ISO);
 b. ‘’quasi formal’’ groups – typically large and well organized, e.g. the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF); and
 c. smaller, privately-organized consortia.

 Many organisations are part of multiple SDOs

 SDOs through informal consortia generates move innovation
 Traditionally firms competed in R&D ahead of the working group meetings of SDOs, thereby
generating a large volume of patented innovations of which only a fraction would eventually become
‘essential’. This formal process generated R&D cost duplications and delays due to vested interests
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SDOs
 Firms increasingly rely on informal consortia to take the lead in the standard setting process, wherein
a group of firms seek to agree on a common design that they will jointly push as a standard
 Participating in consortia helps firms to access and control strategic knowledge
 Consortia can have a deflating effect in a minority of standards that are characterized by a particularly
strong patent race pattern: where consortium members compete to increase their patent applications
 SDO’s governance rules seem to be striking a good balance in preserving the incentives to innovate of
the undertakings involved and encouraging them to participate in the development of standards. SDOs
have gradually improved the effectiveness of their policies to ensure that one interest group does not
dominate others
 SDOs increase the intrinsic technological values of patents. Most importantly, SDOs generate
innovation, which naturally increases the value of patents that are essential to implementation of
standards

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SDOs
 One way of measuring the quality of patents is through citations, i.e. the number of times that a
particular SEP is cited as prior art by later patent applications. Using citations as a measure of
technical value, it is clear that on average, patents that are disclosed as essential to implementation of
a standard are more valuable than those that are not in any standard.
 SDO patents are cited far more frequently than a set of control patents, and SDO patents receive
citations for a much longer period of time
 Explicit coordination on standard setting substantially reduces the risk for developers and adopters to
be confronted with new technology standards.
 Increase in the number of firms in the group decreased the risk-adjusted abnormal return and the
market risk of each firm, but increased the idiosyncratic risk (as measured by the variance of firm
returns).
 Ownership of essential patents boosted firms’ financial returns, and argue that owning patents may
also serve other purposes such as signalling technological competency.

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SDOs
 SDOs are generally concerned to assure a balanced epresentation of categories of interest (differently
sized firms or consumers, as well as different industries) and to design rules to prevent a single
member from dominating standard development.
 Different SDOs apply very different voting mechanisms. This seems to reflect the diverse structures of
various SDOs and their attempt to balance the interests of the different members involved. Moreover,
SDOs typically have multi-stage voting procedures for standards, and usually have a menu of different
rules for different standards. In addition, in order to ensure that everyone is heard, approximately half
of the SDOs in the Baron and Spulber (2015) sample allow their members to appeal the votes and
decisions on standards.
 Typically, all members have a vote, but the vote may be weighted. For example, at ETSI, the votes are
weighted based on the volume of sales; or may be on a national basis reflecting the weights in the
European Council.

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SDOs
 Almost all SDOs examined in Baron and Spulber (2015) have open membership, i.e. all interested
parties can join the SDO subject to specific procedures
 Some SDOs allow non-members to participate in their meetings
 Products manufactured in accordance with standards normally satisfy the statutory requirements for
patent protection. Generally, patents covering these standardized technologies are owned by firms
whose employees made inventive contributions to the standard.
 SDOs often require that their participants disclose patents that are likely to be necessary for the
manufacture and use of standard compliant products. This requirement generates databases of SEPs
(Standard Essential Patents), which are used to estimate patent coverage of SDOs.
 Licencing rules vary depending on the industry. Patents in the field of audio-visual technologies have
the highest share of pooled patents, while patent pooling is yet very uncommon for
telecommunication technologies85. Digital communication technologies often allow reciprocity
licensing and in most cases they state to be prepared to license under FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and
Non-Discriminatory) conditions

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SDOs
 Royalty-free SDO licensing policies are not uncommon. Their motivation for holding the SEP is largely
defensive, i.e. to protect themselves from patent infringement litigation or as bargaining chips in
negotiations with other patent holders. Therefore, these SEPs are royalty-free in practice.
 Royalty-free licencing may suit some firms – such as vertically—integrated companies that are able to
receive a return on their innovation through selling products – but not all. In particular, royalty free
licensing may deny patent holders returns on their patent portfolios and discourage the pure research
firms from participating in SDOs
 SDOs regularly update their licensing and disclosure policies as they learn from their activities and
mistakes, and because the market contexts in which they are present are dynamic
 It appears that the link between SDO policy and firm participation is determined by the extent to
which the SDO depends on the sponsor firms, i.e. firms with patents

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References
 Economic Impact of Technology Standards: Section 3

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