R&D: Competition, Risk, and Performance

Anticipated post-innovation collusion encourages R&D effort, but realized collusion later yields deadweight losses. In balancing this trade-off, Bertrand industries sometimes outperform Cournot; sometimes not. Both usually out perform perfectly collusive industries. The optimal level of collusion is often less collusive than Cournot duopoly..

The Diffusion of New Technology and the Market for an Innovation

This article shows that the diffusion of a capital-embodied process innovation results from a pattern of decreasing incremental benefits and adoption costs for later adoptions. Strategic behavior is inessential to this finding. We develop a method for comparing diffusion rates for different market structures in the capital equipment market. We consider cases with market power on the seller's side of the market and on the buyers' side of the market, a case with no market power, and the welfare-optimal case. We find that a joint venture adopts an innovation more slowly than other market regimes to protect existing capital investments and that the adoption rate is slower than is socially optimal. A monopoly supplier, on the other hand, adopts at a rate faster than is socially optimal. This result is usually also the case when there is no market power. Finally, we show that the monopoly supplier accelerates adoptions faster than in the case where there is no market power, but retards later adoptions. Market power thus makes a difference in diffusion rates, and on which side of the market that power lies makes a considerable difference.

R&D: Competition, Risk, and Performance

Anticipated postinnovation collusion encourages R&D effort, but realized collusion later yields deadweight losses. In balancing this tradeoff, Bertrand industries sometimes outperform Cournot; sometimes they do not. Both usually outperform perfectly collusive industries. The optimal level of collusion is often less collusive than Cournot duopoly. In Bertrand industries, too few firms do R&D. The same goes for long-shot or high-cost projects in all industries. However, in perfectly collusive industries, too many firms invest when a project has medium to high chances of success. Investment by Cournot industries is often close to optimal.