Standard Competition and Competition Policy: The Case of the ICT Industry

Author: Mao Fengfu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2007-01-01
Features: Standards are the order and rules of industrial development. Under normal circumstances, patents may affect one or several enterprises. If they rise to the level of standards, their influence can span an entire industry, or even a country. Therefore, in the context of informatization and globalization, and given the historical adjustments in the global economic and political landscape, studying the competition in standard setting in the network era and analyzing its general development patterns is a necessary task of the times. Although under open conditions, the landscape of standard competition has much broader room for expansion compared to closed conditions, considering the limitations of time and knowledge, this book focuses on the analysis of standard competition under closed conditions, limiting the research scope to the information technology sector, particularly the ICT industry, which is the most fiercely competitive and typical in terms of standard setting. Using these industries as examples, the book examines the determining factors of the development of technology standards within industries, with the aim of providing theoretical support for Chinese enterprises and the government to address the challenges of standard competition. Drawing on the ideas of evolutionary economics, this book views standard competition as a process of institutional formation, employing a game-theoretic framework for the evolutionary analysis of institutional formation. It argues that although standards come in various forms, they are the result of an ongoing evolutionary equilibrium, a product of the strategic behavior of game participants in standard competition.