Competitive Dynamics and Emerging Technology: Industry, Regulation, and Discourse on Autonomous Vehicles

Technological development is transforming not only markets and industries, but the institutional foundations of society itself. As new technologies disrupt established structures and create uncertain futures, understanding the social mechanisms that shape their development becomes essential. This dissertation centers competition as a key structuring mechanism by which actors across industry, government, and civil society navigate technological disruption, define strategic responses, and shape institutional outcomes. Rather than treating competition as a background market condition, I theorize it as a relational, evolving mechanism that influences how firms form alliances, how states regulate, and how public discourse is constructed. Empirically, the dissertation examines the case of autonomous vehicles (AVs), a high-profile and infrastructurally intensive application of AI technologies. I investigate how competitive dynamics unfold across three social domains: regulation, discourse, and industry. Chapter 2 analyzes the regulatory domain, exploring how interstate competition influences the diffusion of AV regulations across U.S. states. Using a novel network-based measure of economic rivalry based on Census Job Flow data, I find that competition accelerates policy adoption but conditions whether states converge or differentiate in regulatory design. Chapter 3 examines the discursive effects of policy adoption in the context of media framing. Using Sentence-BERT and a corpus of 13,000 news articles, I show that in high-competition states, AV policies amplify economic and technological frames while suppressing ethical concerns, suggesting that competition structures not only institutional action but also public meaning-making. Chapter 4 analyzes how inter-industry competition between automakers and technology firms shapes alliance behavior over time. Drawing on a dataset of 517 firm alliances (2015–2024), I show that firms shift from capability-seeking to dependency-management strategies as inter-industry competitive logics evolve. Theoretically, the dissertation integrates insights from economic sociology, network theory, strategic management, cultural sociology, and policy diffusion, emphasizing competition as a field-level mechanism that evolves over time and shapes diverse institutional responses. Methodologically, the project combines quantitative alliance data, network-based policy diffusion models, and computational text analysis to trace how competition operates across domains.