10.17889/E109570V1
Simcoe, Timothy
Replication data for: Standard Setting Committees: Consensus Governance for Shared Technology Platforms
ICPSR Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
2012
10.1257/aer.102.1.305
10.1257/aer.102.1.305
1
Voluntary Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs) use a consensus process to create new compatibility standards. Practitioners have suggested that SSOs are increasingly politicized and perhaps incapable of producing timely standards. This article develops a simple model of standard setting committees and tests its predictions using data from the Internet Engineering Task Force, an SSO that produces many of the standards used to run the Internet. The results show that
an observed slowdown in standards production between 1993 and 2003 can be linked to distributional conflicts created by the rapid commercialization of the Internet. (JEL C78, L15, L86)