Incentives to Innovate, Compatibility and Efficiency in Durable Goods Markets with Network Effects

This paper investigates the relation between firms’R&D incentives and their compatibility decisions regarding durable, imperfectly substitutable network goods in the presence of forward looking consumers. Non drastic product innovation is sequential and both an initially dominant firm and a smaller rival are potential inventors. For sufficiently innovative future products, our first key result is that the dominant firm invests more when there is compatibility and voluntarily decides to supply interoperability information. This happens as the probability that he is the only inventor increases, allowing him to enjoy a higher expected future profit that outweighs the current lost revenue. For economies whose initial market size is considerably large, the rival also demands compatibility but this is no longer true in industries with a relatively smaller number of existing consumers. For less innovative new versions, the dominant firm rejects compatibility and there is a cutoff in network externalities below which he invests more when there is incompatibility. Regarding welfare, we find that a laissez faire Competition Law with respect to the IPR holders is socially preferable.