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Foreword The first essay in Volker Simmering's study in The Evolution of Standards, undertaken while at the Graduate Programme in Law and Economics in cooperation with the Institute of SocioEconomics at the University of Hamburg, examines the effects of "globalization" on the evolution of global standard(). The central result of this essay is that there may be too few global standards and those which do evolve are not necessarily efficient; a result that is at odds with standard economic reasoning. Simmering derives his result from the application evolutionary theory - which is becoming increasingly popular in economics, the social sci ences, and philosophy. This branch of theory focuses on the convergence and selection of equilibria and its attendant reduction of variety. Simmering's study, very interestingly, indicates a major difference in the results of evolu tionary reasoning when applied to the coordination of human interaction to that at the species level. Simmering shows how variety is reduced to produce homogeneity or compatibility; while in biology it has been to show how variety emerges. For example, in his The Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin tried to give an interpretation of the characteristics, diversity, and distribution of the various forms of animal and plant life as the result of a historical proc ess involving descent with modification.
Info autore
Dr. Volker Simmering promovierte bei Prof. Dr. Manfred J. Holler am Graduiertenkolleg "Recht und Ökonomik" der Universität Hamburg.
Riassunto
The value of many goods and many social and legal norms and institutions is correlated to the number of people who adopt them, in other words: They exhibit network effects. But while harmonization enhances network benefits, it also diminishes the benefits derived from variety.
In the first part of his study, Volker Simmering introduces an evolutionary game theoretic model in order to investigate how globalization influences the evolution of international standards and he compares the roles of mandatory and voluntary standards. The second part is devoted to the problem of technological progress in networks, and the third one analyzes the resolution of conflicts within international standardization bodies. As a result, he suggests that policy intervention and the presence of adjacent institutional arrangements are likely to improve the performance of network markets, e.g. those for information technology and telecommunication. Since standardization is difficult to enforce its design is, however, not a trivial challenge.
