On delayed technological shifts

When a new technology capable of superseding an existing one appears, we sometimesobserve the so-called sailing-ship effect, which consists of the old technology’simprovements in response to the emergence of the new one. This helps explain whythe old technology does not disappear quickly. However, some more aspects contributeto slowing down the process of substitution of the new for the old technology, such asusers’ reluctance to switch to the new one, the degree of diffusion of the old technology,and other forces. In this work, we provide a formal model which takes into account boththe technical improvements of the old technology as well as the other forces, where thelatter are synthesised in what we define as a memory effect.