A theoretical analysis on R&D cooperation among competing firms

It is common knowledge that although firms invest their resources to increase their competitiveness in the final markets, they also tend to form cooperative agreements with one another. Cooperation can occur, by promoting anticompetitive practices (cartels, predatory behaviour etc.), by creating commercial partnerships and, last but not least, by forming R&D alliances. In this dissertation we focus on the latter form of cooperation with the objective of analyzing the formation of R&D partnerships among competing firms from a theoretical point of view. After a brief introduction, Chapter 2 provides a primer to the economic analysis made so far on the R&D cooperation among firms. Chapters 3 and 4 present two theoretical models based on the network game analysis. The former chapter is a joint work with Wouter Vergote and it consists of a setting of R&D co-opetition where we study how weak collaborations affect firms' strategic decisions during a patent contest, and how the latter influences the possible collaboration network structures the firms can hope to form. Chapter 4 proposes a network game model among heterogeneous agents with an indefinite number of players with the aim of providing a theoretical background to the increasing R&D cooperation among firms and public research institutions. Finally, Chapter 5 studies the formation and the performance of a single Joint Venture when the partners' contribution has a different impact on the Joint Venture profits.(ECON 3) -- UCL, 201