Are Cooperative R&D Agreements Good For The Society?

Technological progress is crucial for economic growth and enhancement of standard of living in any economy. But firms often have insufficient incentive for R&D, because in spite of patent protection, the benefits of R&D are not always limited to the firms that initially conduct the R&D activities. Consequently, governments around the world often undertake industrial policies to promote collaborative R&D efforts between firms in order to increase R&D. This paper examines the implications of cooperative R&D agreements for the societal well being. The R&D and price decisions are analyzed using a Bertrand Duopoly Model in presence of product differentiation in a two-stage game. It is shown that under cooperative R&D agreements R&D and output levels are larger and prices are lower than under non-cooperation. For complementary and independent goods, these results are valid for any degree of R&D spillover and for substitute goods they may hold even for sufficiently small R&D spillover. These results are more general than D'Aspremont and Jacquemin (1988) who have shown that cooperative R&D levels exceed those under non-cooperation only for large R&D spillover. As for the level of social welfare, this paper finds the cooperative as well as the non-cooperative R&D output and price levels to be socially inefficient. However, cooperative R&D agreements tend to dominate non-cooperative R&D ventures in terms of social welfare. This result also holds for any degree of R&D spillover for complementary and independent goods and even for sufficiently small spillover in the case of substitute goods.