Market size and innovation: The intermediary role of technology licensing

Previous literature finds that larger downstream markets fuel the innovation of new technologies by incentivizing firms to spend more on R&D. Our evidence shows that larger markets also increase the extent of licensing-based cooperation between upstream innovators and downstream commercializers. This cooperation is valuable because it pools firms’ complementary capabilities. Thus, downstream market expansions could positively impact innovative outcomes even holding R&D expenditures constant. Evidence is drawn from the drug candidate licensing market, exploiting the quasi-experimental variation introduced by the enactment of the Medicare Part D program in 2003. A model for the determination of equilibrium commercialization strategies in Markets for Technology rationalizes our finding. In this framework, cooperation gains are proportional to market size but transaction costs are not. Thus, larger downstream markets foster cooperation by reducing the relative importance of the latter. To better match the empirical context, the model extends the canonical “one technology–one application” framework of related work, to the more general case of “composite technologies,” which may have more than one end-user application.