| The situation where all different types of technology in a home environment can communicate to each other and form one home network is becoming a viable one. Such a network will result in advantages in everyday life. Because technology can communicate with other technology inside and outside the home, their functionality increases. When a PC can be connected to a TV the functionality of the TV is enhanced. One can also think of forms of information distribution such as error logs or instruction codes for household appliances and domestic systems being communicated between manufacturer and consumer. Experimental houses are already in operation in the US, Germany, Japan, Holland, Sweden and Switzerland (Miller 2001). Irrespective of the fact that the home network sketched above has been technically possible for many years and that there seems to be a demand for it (Wacks 2002), it has not yet become a practical reality. One reason is the lack of dominant standards for the interconnection between subsystems of the home network (Rose 2001; Wacks 2001; Wacks 2002). We will address this problem in this research. We will develop a model including the most important factors in the selection process of standards in complex systems in which established subsystems are interconnected. A home network is an example of such a system. We address standardization from a market perspective (Farrell and Saloner 1988; Keil 2002), focussing on the process in which a standard becomes dominant in the market. The model builds on existing literature on the selection process of standards and dominant designs from the fields of industrial economics, institutional economics and standardisation (Schilling 1998; Schilling 2002; Suarez 2004) We contribute to this literature by including the application of social network theory to the selection of standards in our model. The model will be empirically tested. |
