The authors develop an agent-based model to reproduce the size distribution of R&D alliances of firms. Agents are uniformly selected to initiate an alliance and to invite collaboration partners. These decide about acceptance based on an individual threshold that is compared with the utility...

Drawing on a large database of publicly announced R&D alliances, we track the evolution of R&D networks in a large number of economic sectors over a long time period (1986-2009). Our main goal is to evaluate temporal and sectoral robustness of the main statistical properties of empirical R&D...