Innovation incentives and competition in the hard disk drive industry

Abstract

Firms in the hard disk drive industry are continually engaging in R & D and improving the quality of their products. We explore various determinants of the product innovation incentives for firms concerned with both their static and expected future profitability. We estimate the observed innovation outcomes as a function of market condition variables which have significant impact on innovation decisions. In addition, we estimate logit utilities that describe the marginal willingness to pay for quality improvements. One aspect of utility is that the willingness to pay for faster access time to data may be initially low but increases over time. The firms' decisions to introduce faster access time are partly motivated by dynamic considerations.