Quality Ladders and Product Cycles
Abstract
We develop a two-country model of endogenous innovation and imitation in order to study the interactions between these two processes. Firms in the North race to bring out the next generation of a set of technology-intensive products. Each product potentially can be improved a countably infinite number of times, but quality improvements require the investment of resources and entail uncertain prospects of success. In the South entrepreneurs invest resources in order to learn the production processes that have been developed in the North. All R&D investment decisions are made by forward-looking, profit-maximizing entrepreneurs. The steady-state equilibrium is characterized by constant aggregate rates of innovation and imitation. We study how these rates respond to changes in the sizes of the two regions and to policies in each region to promote learning. Copyright 1991, the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Download Info
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Bibliographic Info
Article provided by MIT Press in its journal Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Volume (Year): 106 (1991)
Issue (Month): 2 (May)
Pages: 557-86
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Web page: http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/
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Web: http://mitpress.mit.edu/journal-home.tcl?issn=00335533
Related research
Keywords:Other versions of this item:
- Grossman, G.M. & Helpman, E., 1989. "Quality Ladders And Product Cycles," Papers 152, Princeton, Woodrow Wilson School - Public and International Affairs.
- Grossman, G.M. & Helpman, E., 1989. "Quality Ladders And Product Cycles," Papers 39-89, Tel Aviv.
- Gene M. Grossman & Elhanan Helpman, 1989. "Quality Ladders and Product Cycles," NBER Working Papers 3201, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
References
References listed on IDEASPlease 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.:
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Papers
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