Herein I outline an alternative theory of contract and contract enforcement. This theory is based upon two claims, one positive and one normative. The first claim is that incomplete contracting theory fails to explain how economic actors govern production in the new economy. Theories of...

Exporting values into society through technologyChina’s relentless advance in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and quantum computing has engendered a significant amount of anxiety about the future of America’s technological supremacy. The resulting debate centres around the impact of China’s...

Many European policy initiatives continue to promote R&D collaboration in view of its expected benefits. Despite the advantages of R&D cooperation, to benefit from it, firms must create a structure to support the efficient transfer of knowledge-based assets. In fact, the set-up and...

The efficient allocation of control rights in inter-firm collaborations is a widely emphasized issue. In this paper, I empirically identify control rights and the allocation of these rights using a unique survey data set on collaborations between biotechnology and pharmaceutical firms. Fifteen...

This paper analyzes the formation of Research Corporations as an alternative governance structure for performing R&D compared to pursuing in-house R&D projects. Research Corporations are private for-profit research centers that bring together several firms with similar research goals. In a...

This paper investigates the governance design problem of a large company that wants to engage a small and cashless firm into a research collaboration. This analysis reflects the frequently observed collaborations between pharma companies and biotechs, and an actual research contract is assessed...

Drawing on a large database of publicly announced R&D alliances, we empirically investigate the evolution of R&D networks and the process of alliance formation in several manufacturing sectors over a 24-year period (1986-2009). Our goal is to empirically evaluate the temporal and sectoral...

We explore the dynamic evolution of property rights regimes in R&D alliances using the incomplete contract approach pioneered by Grossman, Hart and Moore. In contrast to the standard analysis, the productive asset is an excludable public good such as a patent. Moreover, both firms can decide...

The research provides evidence from a dataset of R&D joint venture contracts about how firms organize collaborative R&D. We work out of a dataset of 96 contracts to construct a taxonomy of the types of mechanisms firms use in organizing collaborative R&D. We identify mechanisms with particular...

Incumbent firms, especially in high-tech industries, often contract and collaborate with small research units on single projects. A delicate resulting contracting decision thus is how to allocate control. This paper considers the incumbent's problem to design a research contract that specifies:...