There is evidence that competing firms outsource R&D to the same independent for-profit laboratory. We draw on this stylized fact to construct a model where two firms in the same industry offer transfer payments in exchange for user-specific R&D services from a common laboratory. Inter-firm and...

We test the theoretical prediction that inter-firm spillovers must necessarily be large for the profit differential between cooperation and non-cooperation in R and D to be monotone increasing with them. By using the French data from the 2002 Community Innovation Survey, we find that spillovers...