The Innovation Race: Experimental Evidence on Advanced Technologies
We present a large-scale field experiment test of strategic complementarities in firms’ technology adoption. Our experiment was embedded in a Bank of Italy survey covering around 3,000 firms. We elicited firms’ beliefs about competitors’ adoption of two advanced technologies: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics. We randomly provided half of the sample with accurate information about adoption rates. Most firms substantially underestimated competitors’ current adoption, and when provided with information, they updated their expectations about competitors’ future adoption. The information increased firms’ own intended future adoption of robotics: a 1 pp increase in the share of competitors expected to adopt advanced technologies causes an increase of 0.704 pp in the firm’s own robotics adoption. We do not observe a significant effect on AI adoption, but we cannot rule out modest effects either. Our findings provide causal evidence on coordination in innovation and illustrate how information frictions shape technology diffusion.

We present a large-scale field experiment on the geography of strategic complementarities in firms’ AI investment. Our experiment was embedded in the ECB’s Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises (SAFE), covering around 3,300 firms across twelve European countries. We elicited firms’ beliefs about the share of domestic and foreign competitors investing in AI, and randomly provided half of the sample with accurate information about both groups. Firms substantially underestimated competitors’ current AI investment, especially for foreign competitors, and updated both domestic and foreign beliefs in response to the information treatment. The information also increased firms’ own expected AI investment rate. Using a 2SLS framework, we find that a 1 pp increase in the expected share of domestic competitors investing in AI raises the firm’s own expected AI investment rate by 0.567 pp, while the corresponding effect of foreign competitors is close to zero and statistically insignificant. Our findings provide causal evidence that information frictions shape the diffusion of innovation and that strate- gic complementarities in AI investment are much stronger at the domestic than at the foreign level.