When can bundling help adoption of network technologies or services? (Steven Weber, Roch Guérin, Jaudelice C. de Oliveira)
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Network technologies (and services) often become more valuable as more users adopt them, e.g., Metcalfe’s law. The flip side of this phenomenon is that many potentially valuable network technologies never take off, as their cost exceeds their initial value (when few are using them). This is often blamed for the slow adoption of IPv6 and security extensions to popular protocols such as DNSSEC and BGP-SEC. Developing approaches to overcome those early adoption hurdles is, therefore, of interest. Bundling technologies so as to appeal to a larger set of early adopters is a possible option, but it is hard to predict why and when it may succeed, i.e., help both technologies. Our goal is to develop principled insight and answers to this question, and in particular how it is affected by correlation in how users value each technology. The paper outlines a possible modeling approach, and points to potential differences with how correlation has traditionally been found to impact bundling’s efficacy.