Adoption patterns over time: a replication

Based on new data, we replicate Mahajan et al.’s (1990) paper on adopter categories and Goldenberg et al.’s (2002) paper on saddles and offer explanations and extensions. We use a new dataset to replicate the results, namely, the U.S. Consumer Technology Association’s Sales & Forecasts, which provides longitudinal data on numerous consumer electronic products. Goldenberg, Libai, and Muller utilized the same source for 1999, while we use the updated 2021 report for the adopter category as well as the saddle replication, thus employing the same data source for both studies. We find that in the adoption of consumer electronics, there are fewer saddles, and these saddles are shorter and shallower in 2021 than they were in 1999. Regarding adopter categories, we break the data down by decades and show that, while the early adopter categories just barely decelerated over the six decades of our analysis, the average growth of the new dataset is much faster, with the peak occurring considerably sooner than that of the earlier data.