Standards development strategies under incomplete information : isn’t the “battle of the sexes” really a revelation game?

Paul A. David, All Souls College, Oxford, Stanford University & MERIT, and Hunter K. Monroe, International Monetary Fund

1/01/2005
(Original Publish Date: 1994)

This paper addresses what has been the most pervasive theme in the rising chorus of complaints, namely, the causes of the protracted duration of the interval between the assignment of a standards-writing task to one or another of these organization's myriad committees, and the emergence of a set of formally authorized, published recommendations -- if and when the committee deliberations do eventuate in a set of recommendations approved by the organization. The approach taken here is analytical, and aims to extend previous efforts to gain theoretical insights into the determinants of the performance of standards committees by modelling the strategy choices of participants in "anticipatory standardization" committees, and examining the equilibrium outcomes of such behavioral decisions in various economic and institutional settings. Our model of the committee process views anticipatory standards development as involving the exchange of technical information between proponents of alternative system designs that have yet to reach the stage of commercial development, and takes a sponsoring participant's key decision variable to be the time at which it ceases to engage in research and committee deliberations intended to convince the other participant(s) to accept its proposed standard.