Open knowledge disclosure, incomplete information and collective innovations

Julien Pénin (penin@unistra.fr)

Working Papers of BETA from Bureau d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, UDS, Strasbourg

Abstract: Why do firms decide sometimes to disclose widely part of their knowledge while they could have kept it secret ? We attempt to provide an original answer to this question by combining the literature in economics of innovation and in economics of incomplete information. We suggest that such practices of open knowledge disclosure can be deliberate strategies aiming at solving adverse selection problems that arise when firms try to find partners with whom to cooperate in R&D. Competent firms can sometimes think it a profitable strategy to disclose knowledge because this disclosure may allow them to display their differences with less competent firms, thus making it easier to start a profitable collaboration with other competent firms. We illustrate this intuition with the help of a signalling game under incomplete information.

Keywords: open knowledge disclosure; signalling; adverse selection; innovation network; R&D collaboration; collective invention. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino, nep-net and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://beta.u-strasbg.fr/WP/2005/2005-10.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ulp:sbbeta:2005-10

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of BETA from Bureau d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, UDS, Strasbourg Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (webmaster@cournot.u-strasbg.fr this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).