The Innovation Race: Experimental Evidence on Advanced Technologies

We present a large-scale field experiment test of 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 accurate information about adoption rates. Most firms substantially underestimated competitors’ current adoption, and when provided with information, they updated their expectations about competitors’ future adoption. The information increased firms’ own intended future adoption of robotics: a 1 pp increase in the share of competitors expected to adopt advanced technologies causes an increase of 0.704 pp in the firm’s own robotics adoption. We do not observe a significant effect on AI adoption, but we cannot rule out modest effects either. Our findings provide causal evidence on coordination in innovation and illustrate how information frictions shape technology diffusion.