Disclosing vs. withholding technology knowledge in a duopoly

Paolo Garella and Emanuele Bacchiega ()

Departmental Working Papers from Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano

Abstract: We study firms' incentives to transfer knowledge about production technology to a rival in a Cournot duopoly. In a setting where two technologies are available, a technology is characterized by its associated cost function and no single technology is strictly superior to the other. A firm has superior information if it knows both techniques and the other only one. Cost efficiency may be "reversed" after the voluntary disclosure, so that the rival's costs are improved at the equilibrium level of output. Adding R&D investments to the picture, we find that a firm can decide to invest just for the purpose of acquiring knowledge that will be transferred and not used. Furthermore, for the same point in the parameters space, the acquisition of full knowledge may occur or not as a function of the initial distribution of information

Keywords: Oligopoly; Information disclosure; R&D Joint Ventures; R&D Consortia; Returns to scale (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L13 O30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-01-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-pr~ and nep-knm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://wp.demm.unimi.it/files/wp/2007/DEMM-2007_001wp.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Disclosing vs. Withholding Technology Knowledge in a Duopoly (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mil:wpdepa:2007-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Departmental Working Papers from Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano Via Conservatorio 7, I-20122 Milan - Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by DEMM Working Papers ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).