Publisher's Synopsis
These papers are the result of a symposium held at INSEAD in June 1986 entitled ``Product Standardization as a Tool of Competitive Strategy''. The aim was to bring together a set of original studies focusing on the way managers view decisions on product competition strategy when compatibility or incompatibility are the crucial issues.;With studies of diverse products and industries, one can generate a set of inductive hypotheses complementary to, but richer than, the deductive hypotheses that come from the optimizing models that have recently appeared in the economics literature. At the same time, one can refute, tentatively support, or at least qualify and elaborate upon these deductive hypotheses and complement the few existing large-scale statistical studies of the causes and effects of standards.
