Abstract
A recent JAMS article reported the following finding: the longer the time between the launch of two adjacent generations in the same product category, the lower the initial rate of adoption of the later generation but the higher its subsequent rate of growth. This note shows that these results could be a method artifact, since they vanish once one controls for differences in the length of the data series used to compute the initial and subsequent rates of growth. So, for the time being, it is premature to accept these intergeneration effects as genuine.
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Christophe Van de Bulte (Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University) (vdbulte@wharton.upenn.edu) is an assistant professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He holds an undergraduate degree in applied economics from the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and is a Fellow of the Belgian American Educational Foundation.His research focuses on new product diffusion and on the role of social networks in marketing settings, and has been published in theAmerican Journal of Sociology, theJournal of Marketing, Management Science, Marketing Science, and other journals. He serves on the editorial boards of theJournal of Business-to-Business Marketing andMarketing Science.
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Van den Bulte, C. Multigeneration innovation diffusion and intergeneration time: A cautionary note. JAMS 32, 357–360 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1177/0092070304263331
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0092070304263331