cooperative and noncooperative r d in duopoly with spillovers contrary to the usual assumption made in most oligopoly models relations among firms are seldom of a wholly cooperative or noncooperative type in many situations they compete in some fields while they cooperate in others an important example is the case of cooperative research efforts bringing fierce competitors together two types of agreement are observed first r d cooperation can take place at the so called precompetitive stage companies share basic information and efforts in the r d stage but remain rivals in the market place 1 a second type of agreement involves an extended collusion between partners creating common policies at the product level the usual justifications of this extension are the difficulties of protecting intellectual property the idea is then to allow partners who have achieved inventions together to also control together the processes and products which embody the results of their collaboration in order to recuperate jointly their r d investments 2 what could be expected from these types of agreement is a reduction in r d expenditures because of less wasteful duplication and a reduction of total production because of more reprinted from the american economic review 78 5 1133 1137 1988 center for operations research econometrics 1348 louvain la neuve belgium we are grateful to jean

competition cooperation and innovation organizational arrangements for regimes of rapid technological progress abstract discussions of the link between firm size and innovation are outmoded because the boundaries of the firm have become fuzzy in recent decades strategic alliances constellations of bilateral agreements among firms are increasingly necessary to support innovative activities such alliances can facilitate complex coordination beyond what the price system can accomplish while avoiding the dysfunctional properties sometimes associated with hierarchy antitrust law and competition policy need to recognize that these new organizational forms are often the functional antithesis of cartels though they may have certain structural similarities a more complete understanding of bilateral contracts and agreements ought to reveal when and how cooperation can support rather than impede innovation and competition

cooperative research in a newly industrialized country taiwan abstract partly triggered by the successful experience of the japanese vlsi program taiwan has launched several cooperative research projects aimed at enhancing industrial competitiveness these undertakings however have not performed as well as expected under such circumstances the taiwanese government is anxious to explore which factors affect the inter industry and inter firm variation in cooperative research activity and to evaluate the feasibility of such r d cooperative projects our analysis suggests that the more research active the industry is the greater is the proportion of those funds allocated to cooperative arrangements and foreign competition is the principal factor which influences a firm s decision to engage in cooperative research activity furthermore we conclude that taiwanese firms should look beyond their own r d as the major source of new technology and become involved in cooperative research the reasons for such a necessity are due to the accelerating pace of technological change scale barriers in high tech industries and taiwan s small and medium sized enterprise dominant status in the industrial structure however a compromise which allows research goals to fall in the middle ground between research oriented and product oriented measures is advisable to match taiwan s current environment in addition implementing a new cost sharing principle and an appropriate incentive scheme to improve research efficiency in government led cooperative programs are urgently needed

networks of innovators a synthesis of research issues abstract this paper will first summarise some key findings of empirical research in the 1960s on the role of external sources of scientific technical and market information in successful innovation by business firms this work demonstrated unambiguously the vital importance of external information networks and of collaboration with users during the development of new products and processes moreover the dilemmas of cooperative research in competitive industries were recognised and studied long ago 35 62 76 what then is new about the present wave of interest in networks of innovators are there new forms of organisation or new technologies or new policies which justify renewed research efforts since they go beyond those developments already analysed in earlier empirical and theoretical work section 2 reviews the evidence of new developments in the 1980s in industrial networks regional networks and government sponsored innovative activities it shows that there has indeed been a major upsurge of formal and semi formal flexible networks in the 1980s including some new types of network it also shows that some older forms of research cooperation have been modified and transformed the papers at montreal largely concentrated on the role of regional supplier networks which are a good example of such new wine in old bottles this paper attempts to locate the regional network discussion within a wider context of new developments in networking section 3 discusses the causes of these new developments and whether they are likely to remain a characteristic of national and international innovation systems for a long time to come or prove to be a temporary upsurge to be overtaken later by a wave of take overs and vertical integration finally section 4 sums up some of the other key issues which require further research and debate and the implications for social science theory

an experimental investigation into cross national mail survey response rates this study investigates the effects of foreign and domestic source manipulations on cross national response rates of business people in two countries the united states and britain the hypothesis that managers from the u s a are more likely to respond than those from britain is also tested results suggest that foreign source effects do not raise response rates for british managers findings suggest that higher compliance results from the domestic source responses from usa managers were no higher than from their british counterparts the implications of these findings for cross national mail surveys are discussed

conducting international mail surveys the effect of incentives on response rates with an industry population mail surveys are one alternative for satisfying information needs about international markets to date minimal empirical research is available to inform academicians or practitioners of expected response rates or of the efficacy of incentives when undertaking mail surveys across disparate cultures the results from a study conducted in six countries suggests that an inexpensive and perhaps symbolic incentive such as a commemorative stamp can significantly increase response rates for academicians conducting cross cultural research the mail survey may be the most cost effective data collection method

foreign mail surveys response rates using monetary incentives the cross national researcher is cautioned about the possible consequences of using monetary incentives in foreign mail surveys in this study a us 1 incentive increased the response rate from japanese business people but decreased the response from hong kong

choosing organizational modes of strategic technology partnering international and sectoral differences this paper focuses on international strategic technology partnerships and the choice that companies have in terms of the organizational mode either through complex inter organizational modes involving equity sharing or contractual non equity alliances the empirical results show that the choice of particular mode of cooperation varies with the technological characteristics of sectors of industry joint ventures are disproportionately represented in relatively mature industries contractual alliances dominate strategic technology partnering in so called high tech industries

the determinants and labour market effects of lifelong learning despite the policy importance of lifelong learning there is very little hard evidence from the uk on a who undertakes lifelong learning and why and b the economic benefits of lifelong learning this paper uses a rich longitudinal panel data set to look at key factors that determine whether someone undertakes lifelong learning and then models the effect of the different qualifications acquired via lifelong learning on individuals economic outcomes namely wages and the likelihood of being employed those who left school with o level qualifications or above were much more likely to undertake lifelong learning undertaking one episode of lifelong learning also increased the probability of undertaking more lifelong learning we found little evidence of positive wage effects from lifelong learning however males who left school with only low level qualifications do earn substantially more if they undertake a degree via lifelong learning we also found important positive employment effects from lifelong

firm size small business presence and sales of innovative products a micro econometric analysis in our generalized tobit analysis we identify a number of variables which have an impact on a firm s innovation output among others we find that larger firms generally have a higher probability of selling some innovative products although this probability increases less than proportionately with firm size given that a firm has some sales of innovative products the share of such products in a firm s total sales tends to be higher in smaller firms moreover a strong small business presence in a sector seems to enhance imitative innovation but has no influence on true innovations whereas market concentration has no influence on innovation output in whatever definition we also find evidence of regional knowledge spill overs furthermore our results are consistent with schmookler s hypothesis that the growth of demand enhances innovation the outcomes about the impact of r d collaboration and technology transfer on innovation remain ambiguous

technology development mode a transaction cost conceptualization technology alliances have emerged in the past decade as a significant mode for the development of innovation the present research assesses the factors explaining whether firms will engage in such technology alliances or utilize the more traditional mode of internal r d the hypotheses stem from a transaction cost conceptualization results suggest that firms which pursue technology alliances are likely to have less commitment to product category specific assets to face higher technological uncertainty to be more capable at measuring innovation performance to have more successful technology alliance experiences and to compete in lower growth product categories 1998 john wiley sons ltd

complementary resources and cooperative research a model of research joint ventures among competitors we present a model of research joint ventures in which if firms have highly complementary skills and resources then they prefer to cooperate in areas where the technology is highly appropriable as in applied research the model also indicates that large firms have a greater incentive to cooperate because they are better positioned to capture the benefits of a research venture these findings seem to explain why cooperative research among rival firms in japan has been applied rather than basic and conducted frequently among large companies but firms prefer as small a partner as possible to limit the sharing of research results creating a tension that may make cooperative efforts among rivals difficult to manage for this reason cooperation with organizations such as universities or nonprofit institutions may be a viable alternative for firms looking for complementary skills and resources

why do low educated workers invest less in further training several studies document that low educated workers participate less often in further training than high educated workers this article investigates two possible explanations low educated workers invest less in training because of 1 the lower economic returns to these investments or 2 their lower willingness to participate in training controlling for unobserved heterogeneity we find that the economic returns to training for low educated workers are positive and not significantly different from those for high educated workers however low educated workers are significantly less willing to participate in training we show that this lesser willingness to train is driven by economic preferences and personality traits

co operative r d why and with whom an integrated framework of analysis abstract firms use r d partnerships to access knowledge and build global r d networks this article develops an integrated framework to examine the determinants of the choice of partners with which firms co operate on r d this resource based perspective underscores the interactions between three major questions why co operate who does and with whom it argues in particular that the choice of partners is dictated by the complementary resources which the latter command the framework is then expanded to predict the relative efficiency of r d co operation with different partners including suppliers clients rivals academic institutions and foreign firms the empirical analysis which is based on responses to france s version of the second european community innovation survey cis 2 strongly supports the overall framework of analysis

firms motivations for cooperative r d an empirical analysis of spanish firms abstract the aim of this paper is to analyze the motives that have caused industrial firms to cooperate in r d there are many theoretical works devoted to the theme but few empirical studies have been carried out with large samples to analyze the factors which determine why firms cooperate in r d we first review the reasons offered by the literature to explain technological cooperation with this allowing us to determine the conceptual framework and to propose some hypotheses we test these hypotheses with a sample of 1652 spanish firms that have carried out r d activities the results obtained suggest that firms motivations for cooperative r d are the complexity of technology and the fact that innovation is costly and uncertain we find that in order to undertake cooperative r d it is necessary to have certain internal capacities in this area with our results being supported by the theory of absorptive capacity however and by contrast with the results presented in other works questions related to market access and search for opportunities do not appear to exert an influence over cooperative r d besides the large sized firms resort more to cooperation and the reasons for cooperative r d differ as between large and small sized firms

the returns to education macroeconomics we offer an extensive summary and a critical discussion of the empirical literature on the impact of human capital on macro economic performance with a particular focus on uk policy we also highlight methodological issues and make recommendations for future research priorities taking the studies as a whole the evidence that human capital increases productivity is compelling though still largely divided on whether the stock of education affects the long run level or growth rate of gdp a one year increase in average education is found to raise the level of output per capita by between three and six percent according to augmented neo classical specifications while leading to an over one percentage point faster growth according to estimates from the new growth theories still over the short run planning horizon four years the empirical estimates of the change in gdp are of similar orders of magnitude in the two approaches the impact of increases at different levels of education appear to depend on the level of a country s development with tertiary education being the most important for growth in oecd countries education is found to yield additional indirect benefits to growth more preliminary evidence seems to indicate that type quality and efficiency of education matter for growth too

what drives the choice of the type of partner in r d cooperation evidence for spanish manufactures and services abstractwe analyse the heterogeneity in firms decisions to engage in r d cooperation taking into account the type of partner competitors suppliers or customers and research institutions and the sector to which the firm belongs manufactures or services we use information from the technological innovation panel pitec for spanish firms and estimate multivariate probit models corrected for endogeneity which explicitly consider the interrelations between the different r d cooperation strategies we find that placing a higher importance to publicly available information incoming spillovers receiving public funding and firm size increase the probability of cooperation with all kind of partners but the role is much stronger in the case of cooperative agreements with research institutions and universities our results also suggest that r d intensity and the importance attributed to the lack of qualified personnel as a factor hampering innovation are key factors influencing positively r d cooperation

incentives and response rates to cross national business surveys a logit model analysis an experiment was designed to assess the effects of an enclosed incentive bookmark a promised incentive offer of free copy of the survey results the target country and the nationality of the parent company on response from a sample of american and japanese owned foreign subsidiaries logit model analysis was used to identify main and interaction effects both the bookmark and nationality of parent company affected response rates while the offer of survey results and target country had no effect no interaction effects were found the implications for cross national mail survey research are discussed

what enhances mathematical ability a cross country analysis based on test scores of 15 year olds this paper examines the mathematical abilities of 15 year olds in a range of countries which participated in the 2003 cycle of the oced s programme for international student assessment pisa utilising information on the scores obtained by individual students in the mathematical part of the pisa assessment we use a range of indicators from the literature on inequality and poverty to evaluate the mathematical performance of participating countries since data from pisa contained a wealth of information on the circumstances of the students in terms of their home and school environment we identify and examine the relative influence of factors which serve to enhance the mathematical performance of students in the pisa assessment