The theoretical discussion concerning the question whether the incumbent or the (potential) entrant invests more into R&D has attracted considerable interest. This paper reports the results of an empirical study on this question using data of about 3500 German firms over the years 1992 to 1995....

We develop a simple model of competition for the market that shows that, contrary to the Arrow view, endogenous entry threat in a market induces the average firm to invest less in R&D and the incumbent leader to invest more. We test these predictions with a Tobit model based on a unique dataset...

Innovation success depends heavily on firm's ability to set priorities and select the most promising options from its project portfolio before the odds of success or failure become visible and reliable. We ask: What does previous innovation experience tell firms about what not to do in the...

We present a dynamic model in which an employee of a firm searches for business projects in a changing environment. It is costly to induce the employee who found a successful project in the past period to search for a new project. Past success can therefore result in profitreducing corporate...

Suppliers play a major role in innovation processes. We analyze ownership allocations and the choice of R&D technology in vertical R&D cooperations. Given incomplete contracts on the R&D outcome, there is a tradeoff between R&D specifically designed towards a manufacturer (increasing investment...

We consider procurement of an innovation from heterogeneous sellers. Innovations are random but depend on unobservable effort and private information. We compare two procurement mechanisms where potential sellers first bid in an auction for admission to an innovation contest. After the contest,...

This paper examines which firms from a heterogeneous pool are more likely to join together and form a research joint venture (RJV). It differs from previous contributions as it introduces a set of realistic hypotheses on the characteristics of research co-operation and information sharing....

This paper discusses the impact of a firm's technology portfolio on its market value. Two concepts are used to characterize a firm's portfolio: the number of technological fields and the degree of relatedness within the portfolio characterized by the amount of joint occurrences of patents in...

This paper examines how product market competition affects firms' timing of adopting a new technology as well as whether the market provides sufficient adoption incentives. It shows that adoption dates differ not only among symmetric firms but also among markets with Cournot and Bertrand...

In this paper, we analyze the problem of congestion and quality loss of data transmission through the Internet from an economic perspective. We show that due to the congestion problem, quality sensitive services are likely to be crowded out by high volume but less quality sensitive applications...