The Influence of Installed Technologies on Future Adoption Decisions: Empirical Evidence from E-Business

This paper studies the adoption times of various e-business technologies in a large sample of firms from 10 different industry sectors and 25 European countries between 1994 and 2002. The results show that the probability of adoption increases with the number of previously adopted e-business technologies. Hence, the more advanced a firm is in using e-business technologies, the more likely it is to adopt additional e-business technologies, provided technologies do not substitute each other in their functionalities. This result is relevant for the marketing of new technologies, strategic planning and, from an economic perspective, for the convergence of growth across regions.