The Formation of R&D Cooperation: An Evolutionary Game Approach
A great number of articles have been published on the subject of R&D cooperation in correspondence with an increasing amount of cooperation in research and development. Many of them propose different theories and models, such as transaction cost economics, the strategic behavior model, social exchange theory and resource-based theory, to analyze the emergence of strategic alliance as well as their cooperation. They are from static perspective. Though R&D cooperation can bring firms a lot of benefits, for instance, sharing risks and costs in the face of uncertain technology development, shortening innovation cycles, the pursuit of efficiency gains, learning through monitoring technology and market development, dealing with regulations and industry standards, to name but a few, it also undertakes severe risks caused by sunk cost and sunk knowledge. Firms, as limited rational players, cant know the relative magnitude of benefits and risks ex ante, they make their decisions whether or nor to cooperate through imitating and learning. Thus, the dynamic process of how firms form R&D cooperation needs to be studied completely. Unfortunately, this process has not been paid appropriate attention. Economic theorists have found evolutionary game theory to be very useful for analyzing extensive economic or management problems. In evolutionary game theory it is assumed that initially all individuals are preprogrammed with some strategy and that the number of individuals playing a particular strategy is adjusted over time by some specified process according to the successfulness of the various strategies. So, evolutionary game theory provides us with a useful tool to analyze how R&D cooperation emerges over time through a process of adaptation. From the evolutionary dynamic process that we modeled, we can draw some implications for the management of firms.
R&D cooperation Evolutionary game theory Formation Assortative matching
WEI Jiubo MI Zhongchun JIN Shengwu
School of Management,University of Science & Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui ,China School of Humanities & Economics, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei , Anhui ,China
国际会议
The Fifth InternationalSymposium on Management of Technology(ISMOT07)(第五届技术与创新管理国际研讨会)
杭州
英文
1696-1699
2007-06-01（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）