Driving factors during the different stages of broadband diffusion: A non-parametric approach

Article history: Received 29 July 2010 Received in revised form 2 May 2012 Accepted 4 July 2012 Available online xxxx A number of socio-economic factors influence broadband diffusion and are assumed to be responsible for the different levels of adoption among countries. Most of the approaches met in literature do not take into account the different stages of the diffusion process and they are parametric. They are based on the construction and study of econometric models, which include all the influential parameters. Regression functions are defined prior to the analysis and they are usually linear in nature. However, this increases the complexity of the system, since the less influential variables are derived during the final stages of the analysis. On the contrary, non‐parametric methods can achieve dimension reduction during the early stages, while they do not require a definition of the regression function. The present work studies the effect of a wide range of social, economic and political factors over the broadband diffusion process, following a non-parametric approach and comparing the results with these of the parametric. Based on criteria from information theory the link function between the level of penetration and the rest variables is derived, providing highly accurate results. The evaluation of the methodology was performed over countries from the wider European area. It is proven that the different stages of broadband diffusion process, defined by the inflection point, are affected by different factors. © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.