An Empirical Study of Open Standards

Rajiv C. Shah, Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Jay P. Kesan, Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

2/21/2008
(Original Publish Date: 9/27/2007)

This project uses empirical data to provide insights into the impact of open standards. This work moves beyond the existing literature’s reliance on handpicked case studies by considering a large number of open standards. The results of this research are timely, as governments are advocating and sometimes mandating the use of open standards. Through our study we found inequalities in the impact of open standards that suggest a power-law relationship. We also found that the duration of the development process does not affect the impact of a standard, but the length of a standard in terms of word length affects the impact of a standard.