Licensing promotes technology transfer and innovation, but enforcement of licensing contracts is often imperfect. We model contract enforcement as a game with perfect information but probabilistic enforcement and explore the implications of weak enforcement on the design of licensing contracts,...

We analyze a model of cost-reducing R&D and compatibility decisions by two platforms. After an exogenous improvement in the efficiency of R&D, each platform has a heightened incentive to make its software incompatible with the rival's hardware device to avoid being dominated in the hardware...

Economists have long recognized that in free markets, incentives to innovate will be diluted unless some factors grant innovators with a temporary monopoly. Patenting is the most cited factor in the economic literature. This survey concentrates on another factor that confers innovators with...

A persistent theme in the academic literature on technological innovation is that incumbent enterprises have great difficulty crossing the abyss created by a radical technological innovation. It is argued that incumbents go into decline, while new entrants rise to market dominance by exploiting...

Organiser son rattrapage industriel est une opération complexe, que le gouvernement et l'industrie japonais ont réussi, particulièrement dans les nouvelles technologies. Pour autant, la capacité à maîtriser la technique ne suffit pas pour imposer ses marchandises aux acheteurs, notamment...

This paper examines empirically the theoretical relationship between external knowledge and innovation success. Special emphasis is posed on the effects that arise from various types of spillovers and how these effects are influenced by firm-specific absorptive capacities. The results of the...

In this paper we give an example in which the price of tradeable emission permits increasesdespite firms' adoption of a less polluting technology. This is in contrast with Montero (2002) andParry (1998), among others. If two Counot players switch to a cleaner technology, the price forpermits may...

We show the effects of Bertrand and Cournot competition on R&D investmentand social welfare in a duopoly with R&D competition where success in R&D isprobabilistic. We show that R&D investments are higher under Bertrand (Cournot)competition when R&D productivities are sufficiently low (high), and...

This paper examines how different unionisation structures affect firms' innovation incentives and industry employment. We distinguish three modes of unionisation with increasing degree of centralisation: (1) 'Decentralisation' where wages are determined independently at the firm-level, (2)...

Two suppliers of a homogenous good know that, in the second period, they will be able to collude. Gains from collusion are split according to the Nash bargaining solution. In the first period, either of them is able to invest into process innovation. Innovation changes the status quo pay-off,...