STACKELBERG GAME, VERTICAL RELATIONS AND R&D INVESTMENTS: ARE THERE FIRST-MOVER ADVANTAGES?

Apostolis Pavlou ()
Additional contact information
Apostolis Pavlou: Council of Economic Advisers, Ministry of Finance, Athens 10180, Greece

The Singapore Economic Review (SER), 2025, vol. 70, issue 02, 367-378

Abstract: This paper studies a Stackelberg game among the downstream firms in a vertical industry where one-way R&D spillovers occur, from the leader to the follower. When the upstream market is perfectly competitive under certain conditions the standard first-mover advantages disappear. When we move to the upstream monopolistic case we find that despite the existence of spillovers in most of the cases, the leader gets higher profits and thus first-mover advantages are reinstated due to the price setting behavior of the upstream firm. It therefore challenges to some extent the “naive†idea that under one-way spillovers there are no incentives for early movers.

Keywords: Stackelberg games; R&D investments; spillovers; wholesale prices; vertical relations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L13 L42 O32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0217590821500302
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
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:wsi:serxxx:v:70:y:2025:i:02:n:s0217590821500302

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S0217590821500302

Access Statistics for this article

The Singapore Economic Review (SER) is currently edited by Euston Quah

More articles in The Singapore Economic Review (SER) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().