Andrea Blasco

Collaboration and Disclosure in Dynamic R&D Races

Recent models of multi-stage R&D have shown that a system of weak intellectual property rights may lead to faster innovation by inducing firms to share intermediate technological knowledge. However, I argue that the positive effect of weak intellectual property regimes on the sharing of intermediate technological knowledge vanishes when technology is complex, as is likely to be the case in many high-tech industries. Under this condition, technologically complex discoveries that are disclosed by a technological leader can be ignored by the follower, who does so when it can free ride off the research of the rival, since ignoring the disclosure encourages more research by the leader.

Patent Races with Dynamic Complementarity

Recent models of multi-stage R&D have shown that a system of weak intellectual property rights may lead to faster innovation by inducing firms to share intermediate technological knowledge. In this article I introduce a distinction between plain and sophisticated technological knowledge, which has not been noticed so far but plays a crucial role in determining how different appropriability rules affect the incentives to innovate. I argue that the positive effect of weak intellectual property regimes on the sharing of intermediate technological knowledge vanishes when technological knowledge is sophisticated, as is likely to be the case in many high tech industries.

Simulations on correlated behavior and social learning

We consider a population of agents that can choose between two risky technologies: an old one for which they know the expected outcome, and a new one for which they have only a prior. We confront different environments. In the benchmark case agents are isolated and can perform costly experiments to infer the quality of the new technology. In the other cases agents are settled in a network and can observe the outcomes of neighbors. We analyze long–run efficiency of the models. We observe that in expectations the quality of the new technology may be overestimated when there is a network spread of information. This is due to a herding behavior that is efficient only when the new technology is really better than the old one. We also observe that between different network structures there is not a clear dominance.