The Innovation Race: Experimental Evidence on Advanced Technologies
We present a large-scale field experiment testing for strategic complementarities in firms’ technology adoption. Our experiment was embedded in a Bank of Italy survey covering around 3,000 firms. We elicited firms’ beliefs about competitors’ adoption of two advanced technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. We randomly provided half of the sample with a signal about adoption among comparable firms. Relative to this signal, most firms substantially underestimated competitors’ adoption, and those provided with the information updated their expectations about competitors’ future adoption. The information increased firms’ intended future adoption of robotics: a 1 pp increase in the share of competitors expected to adopt advanced technologies causes a 0.732 pp increase in the firm’s intention to adopt robotics by 2027. Our findings provide causal evidence on coordination in innovation and illustrate how information frictions shape technology diffusion.
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Copy CitationZoë B. Cullen, Ester Faia, Elisa Guglielminetti, Ricardo Perez-Truglia, and Concetta Rondinelli, "The Innovation Race: Experimental Evidence on Advanced Technologies," NBER Working Paper 34532 (2025), https://doi.org/10.3386/w34532.Download Citation
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