Abstract: The paper examines why digital identity systems, despite clear efficiency gains, often face adoption barriers and proposes actionable mechanisms to overcome them. The theoretical framework integrates bounded rationality, game-theoretic coordination with network effects, and tools from experimental economics. We build a coordination game with multiple equilibria in which individual payoffs depend on the share of adopters and individual costs/fears. Three interventions are analyzed — subsidies, social signals, and choice architecture — and shown to reduce the critical mass threshold, shifting the system from status quo to a high-adoption equilibrium.

The empirical component is a comparative analysis of Estonia, India, and Ukraine. We find that a «design of trust» — transparent access logs, remedies for unauthorized use, and clear risk communication — is decisive for sustained adoption even under technological complexity. Barriers cluster into three groups: individual (loss-of-control concerns, status-quo bias, digital divide), institutional (legal ambiguity, low accountability), and business-related (integration costs, lack of near-term incentives). The model quantifies how moderate subsidies and strong social signals materially lower the adoption threshold; their combination yields the largest effect. We propose a policy toolkit: targeted entry micro-subsidies, default-based behavioral interface design, localized social proof, and pilot RCTs to evaluate effectiveness.

The contribution is a synthesized behavioral–institutional–strategic framework operationalized in a tractable model with explicit intervention parameters and managerial metrics. The practical value is a roadmap for moving from a coordination trap to a positive equilibrium via a trust-centered design that jointly leverages law, technology, and nudge instruments.