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Standard Setting Committees

Timothy Simcoe
Boston University - School of Management; University of Toronto - Joseph L. Rotman School of Management

December 1, 2008

Abstract:
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 paper 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.

Keywords: Standards, Compatibility, Comittee, Internet

JEL Classifications: D71, O3, L44, L63

Working Paper Series

Date posted: May 04, 2006 ; Last revised: April 30, 2009

Suggested Citation

Simcoe, Timothy S., Standard Setting Committees (December 1, 2008). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=899595

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