Technology adoption expectations in the face of temporal uncertainty: an analysis of survey data from manufacturing firms

Abstract

ABSTRACT The paper studies the link between yearly behavioural expectations and technology adoption decisions of entrepreneurs and managers in the temporal context. According to our hypothesis, the expectations of managers are of a heterogeneous nature, possessing both backward-looking and forward-looking properties, and the external conditions may influence the severity of these properties in the expressed expectations. In the paper, three types of correlations are analyzed in the framework of regression analysis, that is, a link between past and present expectations (the ‘inertial’ mechanism), a link between present expectations and current levels of technology adoption in an industry (the ‘adaptive’ mechanism), and a link between present expectations and future levels of technology adoption (the ‘forward-looking’ mechanism). The main conclusion of the work is that radical external unforeseen shocks strongly decrease inter-temporal links between past expectations and present expectations and behaviour, which are represented by the inertial and forward-looking mechanisms respectively, and promote a link between current behaviour and the present expectations, which is represented by the adaptive mechanism.