The Invariance of R&D to the Number of Firms in the Industry

Raaj Sah () and Joseph Stiglitz

No 1798, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Thi spaper presents certain remarkably simple results concerning market's allocation to R&D and its comparison to socially efficient allocations. We posit that a firm can undertake more than one project aimed at the same innovation, and consider a product market characterized by Bertrand competition. Among the results we obtain is that the market R&D (that is, the number of projects undertaken, and the effort spent on different projects) is invariant to the number of firms. We also examine the effects of the number of firms on the gains from innovation to consumers, firms, and society, and show, in particular, that the market undertakes less R&D than is socially desirable.

Date: 1986-01
Note: PR
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published as Sah, Raaj Kumar and Joseph E. Stiglitz. "The Invariance of Market Innovation to the Number of Firms," Rand Journal of Economics, Vol. 18, No. 1, Spring 1987, pp. 98-108.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w1798.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Invariance of Market Innovation to the Number of Firms (1987)
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:nbr:nberwo:1798

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w1798

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().