Heterogeneous agents, complementarities, and diffusion - Do increasing returns imply convergence to international technological monopolies?

The work analyses the properties of international technological, diffusion with interdependent markets in presence of some form of dynamic increasing returns and externalities, heterogenous agents and stochastic adoptions. We build and refine upon previous results from Bassanini and Dosi (1998), whe re a) we show the conditions of convergence to either technological monopol y or market sharing ultimately depending on the balance between increasing returns and degrees of agents' heterogeneity, and b) we establish the (diff erent) rates of convergence to either limit states. In the multi-market, in ternational, extension considered here we determine the conditions yielding to world monopoly or conversely to world market sharing cum local monopoli es. Together, the model accounts also for the rare empirical occurence of s table market sharing in each single market on the grounds of the (slower) r ates of convergence that such a limit configuration entails.