Statistical Basis for Predicting Technological Progress

Statistical Basis for Predicting Technological Progress

Forecasting technological progress is of great interest to engineers, policy makers, and private investors. Several models have been proposed for predicting technological improvement, but how well do these models perform? An early hypothesis made by Theodore Wright in 1936 is that cost decreases as a power law of cumulative production. An alternative hypothesis is Moore's law, which can be gene...

Diversity and Technological Progress

This paper proposes a tractable model to study the equilibrium diversity of technological progress and shows that equilibrium technological progress may exhibit too little diversity (too much conformity), in particular, foregoing socially bene…cial investments in “alternative”technologies that will be used at some point in the future. The presence of future innovations that will replace current...

Cultural Resources for Coping with Technological Progress

One of the most important factors affecting the future of mankind is the progress at technology. In my paper I shall ask how far human values are endangered by technological development and, conversely, how far certain restrictions placed on technology by these human values can be justified. It seems to me, however, that to specify such values and to legitimise certain restrictions on technolog...

Technological Progress and Sectoral Shares

This paper studies the effect of differences in the rate of technological progress between sectors on the relative sizes of those sectors in terms of revenues. There are two sectors: a stagnant sector, where productivity does not change over time, and a progressive sector, where costs decrease over time due to exogenous technological progress. We consider a conjectural variation approach to com...

Technological Progress Towards Sustainable Development