This paper investigates how market concentration affects research activity in an economic cluster. The firms in the cluster play a two-stage game. In the first stage the firms choose whether or not to engage in costly research that generates technological improvements that spill over to the other firms in the cluster. The more firms engaged in research the richer or more profitable is the pool of knowledge that spills over. In the second stage after the knowledge spillovers have occurred, firms compete in quantities. We solve for the symmetric mixed strategy equilibrium to the first stage of the game, and find that too low a degree of concentration in the cluster will destroy firms’ incentives to undertake research and so the cluster risks stagnation. We explore whether a merger can stimulate research activity by increasing concentration in the cluster. Finally, we consider a public policy response to stagnation and analyze whether a direct public subsidy to stimulate research is preferable to a self-financing arrangement. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2004
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: