The adoption of the compact disk player: an event history analysis for the Netherlands

The compact disk (CD) player was one of the major audio innovations of the 1980sin the Netherlands. For studies of the temporal and social diffusion pattern of the CD player andthe compact disks, both cultural and economic theories about innovations and music consumptionare available. In this paper, these theories are combined in six working hypotheses concerningearlier adoption. The empirical analysis includes both time-invariant and time-varying variables andconsumer characteristics. Event history analysis, the technique used in this article, enables one toincorporate these kinds of variables simultaneously in a dynamic model. Compared with the diffusionmodels usually employed by means of longitudinal analysis, event history analysis is a significantimprovement in studying the development of the CD market in the Netherlands.