Interdependent technology attributes and the diffusion of consumer electronics

Abstract

In many studies on innovation diffusion, five attributes of innovations by Rogers [Rogers, E.M., 2003. Diffusion of Innovations. Free Press, New York] are used to explain the adoption of innovations. These five attributes (relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability and observability) are related to each other. This paper develops a theoretical framework on how these attributes are interrelated. We show empirically that modelling the theoretical interdependencies leads to better results in predicting the adoption of consumer electronics. Further, we show that our framework is not only valid on a product-domain level, but also for separate clusters within the product domain.