Cooperative research for R&D-intensive industries.

摘要

This study inquires into the causes of the recent increase in the number of collective industrial research undertakings and the effect of such undertakings on industry performance and conduct. Its main focus is the investigation of the social desirability of cooperative research in different industrial settings.;The theory developed in the present study supports selective public preference for collective undertakings of research in knowledge-intensive, although technologically maturing, industrial sectors. This result is due to a combination of economic factors that limit the firms' ability and/or willingness to commit the socially optimal levels of investment in technology related activities when the research markets associated with such sectors are organized noncooperatively. The most important of these factors were found to be: declining technological opportunities, high research costs, research targets shifting towards process innovations (as opposed to product innovation), declining ability to appropriate technological knowledge, and industry demand curves which are characterized by relatively low price elasticities.;It is shown that, under the above conditions, institutions that promote technological cooperation would rank high in public preference. Furthermore, research cooperatives which additionally strive for higher degrees of knowledge sharing among their members than those achieved by the market will be socially beneficial in a much wider set of industrial environments than those cooperatives which simply facilitate the allocation of research efforts under a joint profit maximization rule without affecting knowledge spillovers.;Research cooperatives will not, however, be always socially beneficial. In particular, those that do not affect the rates at which member firms share information will be socially harmful when research spillovers are relatively low. The reason why they will be harmful is that, when the conditions named in the previous paragraph do not hold, these cooperatives become a pretext for collusion to restrict output.