His experience with primitive coal tramways resulted in this gauge width being copied by the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, then the rest of Great Britain, and finally by railroads in Europe and North America.
[15] A common expression of the concept is the claim that predictable amplifications of small differences are a disproportionate cause of later circumstances, and, in the "strong" form, that this historical hang-over is inefficient.
In economic development, it is said (initially by Paul David in 1985)[17] that a standard that is first-to-market can become entrenched (like the QWERTY layout in typewriters still used in computer keyboards).
There may have been no reason to prefer one place to another before the industry developed, but as it concentrates geographically, participants elsewhere are at a disadvantage, and will tend to move into the hub, further increasing its relative efficiency.
[24] In the 1980s, the US dollar exchange rate appreciated, lowering the world price of tradable goods below the cost of production in many (previously successful) U.S. manufacturers.
Liebowitz and Margolis distinguish types of path dependence;[25] some do not imply inefficiencies and do not challenge the policy implications of neoclassical economics.
[31] Scholars such as Kathleen Thelen caution that the historical determinism in path-dependent frameworks is subject to constant disruption from institutional evolution.
[32] Based on the theory of path dependence, Monika Stachowiak-Kudła and Janusz Kudła show that legal tradition affects the administrative court’s rulings in Poland.
This effect is persistent even if the verdicts are controversial and result in serious consequences for a party and when the penalty paid by the complainant is perceived as excessive but fulfilling the strict rules of law.
The German tradition of law favours legal certainty, while the courts from the former Russian and Austrian partitions are more likely to refer to the principle of justice.
Interestingly, the institutional factors can be identified almost one hundred years after the end of the partition period and the unification of formal and material law, corroborating the existence of path dependence.
[33] Paul Pierson's influential attempt[specify] to rigorously formalize path dependence within political science, draws partly on ideas from economics.
Herman Schwartz has questioned those efforts, arguing that forces analogous to those identified in the economic literature are not pervasive in the political realm, where the strategic exercise of power gives rise to, and transforms, institutions.