On "Badly Behaved" Dynamics: Some Applications of Generalized urn Schemes to Technological and Economic Change

Abstract

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Path dependent stochastic models to detect planned and actual technology use: A case study of OpenOffice

“…Fig. 1 also reveals a typical difference between Pólya and Friedman's urn models: a Pólya's model statistically converges to a random variable [17] whereas a Friedman's model to the constant value ½ [25]. This indicates that the Friedman's model statistically convergence to the equilibrium point of equal number of red and white balls.…”

“…Literature in technological change claims that path dependence models and urn models play a key role in explaining evolutionary processes in the economic market and in organizations. They have been studied for their application to economics, political and social sciences [13,17,32,47]. For example, they have been used: in economics to characterize the emergence of a single clustering location of industrial companies [5,2], in the technology sector, to evaluate the pattern of selection of technologies [1] like the predominance of a given keyboard standard [12]), in medical sciences to model the assignment of patients to hospitals [30,60], in social sciences to understand the emergence of conformity in specific environmental settings or the network formation [51,61], and in politics to study the evolution of political institutions [40].…”