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Do early adopters matter? The people who chomp at the bit to get their hands on new technologies are often credited with ensuring their spread to the rest of the masses. Gmail, Google Glass and bitcoin were all pioneered by this bunch.

But did their initial interest – or brutal lack of it – have any hand in the eventual fate of these products?

One of the first studies to look at the question, published last week by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, seems to find answers. Make early adopters feel special, and their resulting enthusiasm seems to help technology go viral. Fail to do so, though, and not only do they abandon the technology, but they may have the power to convince the rest of us to do the same.


The study took advantage of a unique opportunity at MIT. In 2014, two undergraduates raised $500,000 so they could offer all incoming freshmen access to $100-worth of bitcoins.

Seeing a chance to piggyback on MIT’s Bitcoin Project, two researchers at the MIT Sloan School of Management set up an experiment to study early-adoption behaviours. Some 3108 MIT freshmen signed up to the experiment’s waiting list.

Catherine Tucker and Christian Catalini identified early adopters as the first 25 per cent of students to sign up on the waiting list in the first 24 hours. They classified the rest as late adopters.

But instead of dishing out the goods in the order that people had signed up, they randomly delayed giving half the participants their bitcoins by two weeks. “Some natural early adopters got their bitcoin right away, and other early adopters had to wait,” says Catalini, with the latter forced into the role of late adopters.

Natural late adopters were indifferent to the delay, being no more likely to hang on to the currency than they were to abandon it by cashing out.

By contrast, thwarted early adopters were more likely to abandon the currency within two weeks than early adopters who received it immediately. And overall, thwarted early adopters were 4.3 times more likely to cash out than natural late adopters.

Knock-on effect

That wasn’t the biggest effect, however. When early adopters cashed out, they also influenced those around them to do so in high numbers: 225 days after the start of the experiment, dormitory buildings with more delayed natural early adopters had 45 per cent fewer active bitcoin users – suggesting that early-adopter behaviour influences that of late adopters.

This may provide a psychological mechanism for the oft-observed phenomenon that the adoption of a new idea or product tends to follow an “S-shaped curve”: a slow start, followed by a fast, steep uptick as the technology takes off, and finally a levelling-off as the technology becomes familiar and less interesting.

Catalini and Tucker say their study shows that early adopters can stifle the initial increase and accelerate the flattening of the curve if you compromise their ability to be first and to gloat about that fact.

Granted, it is hard to know whether these insights can be extrapolated easily to other products and technologies.

However, Catalini says that if tech companies and start-ups want their products to go big, they would do well to protect and nurture their early adopters’ desire for exclusivity.

When the study began, $100 bought you roughly one-third of a bitcoin; for those who held on to it, that one-third of a bitcoin would be worth $850 today.

Willy Vasquez, an MIT student who participated in the 2014 experiment as a natural late adopter, used $2-worth to buy a Clif bar from the MIT Media Lab’s bitcoin vending machine, and kept the rest. “I didn’t spend any bitcoins right away because I knew how valuable it had gotten back in 2013, so it seemed better to ride the wave and see where it went,” he says. Vasquez uses his windfall to invest in other cryptocurrencies.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aal4476

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