2026/01/01 by Carolina Curvale · 1 voice
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #Digital Economy and Work Transformation #Digital Platforms and Economics #FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
paper · doi:10.2139/ssrn.6692385
crossref issued 2026/01/01 · crossref published 2026/01/01 · openalex publication_date 2026/01/01 · crossref created 2026/05/02 · crossref deposited 2026/05/02 · crossref indexed 2026/05/04 · openalex created_date 2026/05/05 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/15
Consumer-side generative AI encounter in Latin America is shaped by institutional and infrastructural channels specific to technology-taker economies, but not those the standard political-economy literature predicts. This paper develops a two-stage framework, distinguishing consumer-encounter from firm-expectation, with distinct binding constraints at each stage. Stage-1 analysis draws on a weekly Google Trends panel of generative AI search interest across seven platforms for nineteen Latin American countries (2020–2024), cross-validated against Cloudflare Radar and Similarweb. One robust finding emerges: the combination of political stability with weak state capacity predicts Gemini's market share through an ecosystem-default mechanism concentrated in low-formal-sector, thinly engaged consumer markets (joint institutional F(3,12) = 5.21, p = 0.016; robust to bootstrap inference and outlier exclusion). Two additional patterns — internet penetration individually predicting encounter velocity (standardized β = 0.66, p = 0.099) and regulatory quality individually correlating with platform diversification — are suggestive individual-coefficient findings not clearing joint-family significance. Stage-2 analysis draws on employer-expectation data from the WEF Future of Jobs 2025 survey for Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, revealing that firm-side constraints are operational-regulatory and human-capital rather than macro-institutional. Each stage falls outside the scope of the standard institutions-and-investment literature in a different way: the real-options mechanism requires irreversible commitment under political uncertainty, a condition consumer-side adoption of zero-marginal-cost products does not satisfy and firm-side adoption satisfies only partially. The paper develops evidence consistent with a scope limitation on the institutions-and-investment literature.