Suchergebnisse

D'Aspremont and Jacquemin's (1988) model is extended to study alternative configurations of research agreements in a two--country integrated world economy. Under unambiguous conditions on spillovers we show that: 1) Allowing national firms to cooperate in R\&D confers them an advantage over foreign rivals, an effect similar to R\&D subsidies. 2) In a policy game, each government would allow national cooperative agreements. 3) Contrary to other trade policies which lead to a ``prisoners' dilemma'' result, welfare in both countries increases when they both allow R\&D cooperation. 4) Welfare is even higher if a generalized (international) coalition is formed.

AbstractKamien et al. (1992) show that an industry‐wide research joint venture (RJV), compared to the case without any RJV, does not lead to better technological development or a higher consumer surplus. In contrast, we show that every non‐industry‐wide RJV leads to strict improvements in both measures and it also results in higher production efficiency. Furthermore, when technology transfer is possible after making R&D investment, our results continue to hold, and when research efficiency is low, these improvements are further magnified. Governments should encourage innovation through independent collaboration with technology transfer as an alternative to establishing industry‐wide research consortiums.

AbstractThe paper shows that, whenever the completion of a research project requires the overcoming ofmore than oneresearch obstacle, then Research Joint Ventures enjoy an intrinsic advantage relative to independent firms. This advantage, which has hitherto escaped attention in the RJV literature, relates to the RJV's ability toorganizeresearch more efficiently than independent firms. The fact that RJVs can be both more profitable and yield higher expected net welfare than independent firms is surprising because it is derived from a model in which RJVs donotoptimize over R&D investment. The paper exploits a basic result in systems reliability theory to establish the organizational superiority of RJVs.

AbstractWe study multiple research joint ventures (RJVs) using a repeated game with imperfect monitoring. Compared with the single joint venture case, we show that cooperation in multiple joint ventures creates two advantages for participating firms. First, by linking decisions together across all joint ventures firms can mitigate the likelihood of cooperation breakdowns following bad R&D outcomes. Second, as the incentive cost to sustain cooperation is independent of the number of joint ventures, the economy of scale effect reduces the efficiency loss due to imperfect monitoring.

"Though there is a body of theoretical literature on research joint venture (RJV) participation facilitating collusion, empirical tests are rare. Even more so, there are few empirical tests on the general theme of collusion. This note tries to fill this gap by assuming a correspondence between the stability of research joint ventures and collusion. By using data from the U.S. National Cooperation Research Act, we show that large RJVs in concentrated industries are more stable and hence more suspect to collusion." (author's abstract)

The US government has decidedly moved towards encouraging co-operation in research and development (R&D) between firms, universities, and other research institutes since the early 1980s. The Republican Administration in the early 1980s set the stage for a radical shift in market environment affecting business strategy and behaviour, including the undertaking of co-operative R&D, by introducing extensive changes in antitrust and intellectual property rights law and enforcement. These changes weakened competition policy and significantly strengthened IPR protection. Moreover, a series of legislative actions created the legal framework for promoting industry-university-government co-operation in science and technology and for allowing industry and universities to benefit financially from the results of research funded by the federal government The Democratic Administrations in the 1990s further built on this system, largely by pushing forward a series of Programmes actively promoting government-industry-university partnerships and trying to "channel" private sector R&D activity in technological areas with potentially widespread economic returns. While many of the specific S&T programmes have since been scaled down by Congress, the general policy orientation towards closer collaboration between industry, universities, and government has remained intact.

In this paper we test whether participation in EU sponsored Research Joint Ventures (RJVs) has a positive impact on participating firms' performance. We apply our statistical methodology to RJVs sponsored under two different programmes: EUREKA and (3rd and 4th) Programme Frameworks for Science and Technology (PFST). Overall results show a positive association between participation, labour and total factor productivity, and price cost margin only in the case of EUREKA. On the contrary, firms participating FPST RJVs do not show any clear pattern.

This paper reconsiders the explanation of R&D subsidies by Spencer and Brander (1983) and others by allowing firms to license their innovations and to pool their R&D investments. We show that in equilibrium R&D joint ventures are formed and licensing occurs in a way that eliminates the strategic benefits of R&D investment in the export oligopoly game. Nevertheless, national governments are driven to subsidize their own national firms in order to increase their strength in the joint venture bargaining game. Therefore, our analysis suggests an alternative explanation of the observed proliferation of R&D subsidies.

This paper describes a classroom exercise that illustrates the investment incentives facing firms when technological spillovers are present. The game involves two stages in which student "sellers" first make investment decisions then production decisions. The classroom game can be used to motivate discussions of research joint ventures, the free-rider problem, collusion, and antitrust policy regarding research and development.