The role of patents is threefold: first, they are important to state the property rights of an invention; second, they are necessary to secure financing for starting a new venture; third, they are fundamental to recoup R&D investments. The main difficulty in preventing unauthorized use of an...

I study an economy where oligopolistic firms establish in-house R&D programs to produce a continuous flow of cost-reducing (incremental) innovations. The scale of firms' R&D operations determines the rate of productivity growth. I first study the role of concentration, firm size, and demand,...

Evidence shows that firms build their market position by consistently investing in R&D over time and accumulating knowledge protected by secrecy, patents and other appropriability devices. To explore the macroeconomic implications of this fact, I construct an economy where oligopolistic firms...

We develop a model of vertical innovation in which firms incur a market entry cost and choose a unique level of quality. Once established, firms compete for market shares, selling to consumers with heterogeneous tastes for quality. The equilibrium of the pricing game exists and is unique within...

In the spirit of Arrow (1962), we examine, in an oligopoly model with horizontally differentiated products, how much a firm is willing to pay or a process innovation that it would be the only one to use. We show that different measures of competition (number of firms, degree of product...

The paper investigates firms' behavior and outcomes (levels of cost-reducing R&D, output, profit and welfare in equilibrium) in a differentiated duopoly with process innovation. One of the important features in this paper is that spillovers operate in the R&D stage and are tied to the degree of...

The paper investigates firms’ behavior and outcomes (levels of cost-reducing R&D, output, profit and welfare in equilibrium) in a differentiated duopoly with process innovation. One of the important features in this paper is that spillovers operate in the R&D stage and are tied to the degree...