Methods to Assess the Value of New Technologies: the Case of Consumer Sentiment Towards Digital Wallet Technology

Abstract

New technologies and scientific findings are typically announced in peer-reviewed scholarly journals which seldom assess the economic or social consequences of the technology, even though this may be important in motivating funding for future extensions and commercial applications of the research. This paper describes new methodologies that have become available with the advent of social network data and computationally intensive statistical methods to ascertain the value of new technologies. It provides an example application of two methodologies to answer basic questions in a specific industry, regarding the dynamic processes governing IP protection, innovation law, market structure and evolution, and rates or entry and exit. It also proposes a third affective technology for revealing true consumer sentiment and discusses risks and controls of collecting such affective data, which is commercially important in areas such as film and television review, food and beverage consumption, and in general arenas that display strong non-verbal or emotive characteristics, which would be likely subjects for data acquisition. Our application collected 449,145 Twitter postings on consumer perceptions of digital wallet payment systems and collected all available information on patents in the US Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) databases on digital wallet technologies. Automated lexical analysis was programmed and applied to individual tweets to extract consumer sentiment concerning specific technologies in the USPTO database, and assessed using customized econometric methods. The application of methodologies in this topic area can provide guidance for using newly available datasets to assess the potential economic value and consumer acceptance of new technologies arising out of the laboratory.