Cooperation in R&D: Patenting, Licensing, and Contracting

Sudipto Bhattacharya, Claude d’Aspremont (), Sergei Guriev, Debapriya Sen and Yair Tauman ()
Additional contact information
Claude d’Aspremont: CORE, Universite Catholique de Louvain
Yair Tauman: Stony Brook University

Chapter Chapter 10 in Game Theory and Business Applications, 2014, pp 265-286 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Innovative activity uses anihd produces knowledge. This is both costly and risky and the resulting product has (at least partially) the main characteristics of a public good: it is non-rival and non-excludable. Without any sort of protection, individual agent would have little incentive to do research for fear of unsuccessful research effort or for fear of imitation by others (through spillovers or free access). In this chapter, we use game-theoretic concepts to analyze R&D collective arrangements in settings involving both complete and incomplete contracts. The first topic is patent protection and the comparison of the main forms of licensing in various industry contexts, structures or sizes – including the role of various factors such as product differentiation, innovation magnitude, and asymmetric information. The second focus is the long-debated relationship between innovative activity and the intensity of competition. Here, we review the benefits of various types of cooperative R&D agreements in the presence of externalities. The last two topics concern contracting issues. In a complete contracting setting, we review the design of licensing mechanisms allowing for full knowledge sharing under incomplete information. Finally, we consider incomplete contracts designed to deal with cumulative or sequential innovation and the associated moral hazard problems combining research and development efforts, and the possibility of several buyers for the innovation.

Keywords: Incumbent Firm; Incomplete Contract; Downstream Firm; Sequential Innovation; Research Joint Venture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Working Paper: Cooperation in R&D: patenting, licensing, and contracting (2014)
Working Paper: Cooperation in R&D: patenting, licensing and contracting (2013)
Working Paper: Cooperation in R&D: patenting, licensing and contracting (2013)
Working Paper: Cooperation in R&D: patenting, licensing and contracting (2012)
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:spr:isochp:978-1-4614-7095-3_10

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9781461470953

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4614-7095-3_10

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in International Series in Operations Research & Management Science from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().