The aim of this article is to investigate the impacts of cooperative and non-cooperative R&D strategies on product innovation and firm performance. Based on the industrial economics literature and the optimisation model, R&D competition, R&D cartelisation, and full industry cartelisation strategies of firms operating on a market with differentiated goods and simultaneous price and quality competition are considered. It is showed that R&D cartelisation entails a loss of firm’s product innovation compared with R&D competition. However, profit-maximising firms do not prefer the R&D competition strategy. They prefer to pursue either R&D cartelisation or full industry cartelisation strategies, depending on the elasticity of demand with respect to the firm’s investment in R&D. The social cost of R&D cartelisation is a loss of product innovation, and the social cost of full industry cartelisation is both the loss of product innovation and the loss of consumer surplus due to a relatively high price and low output of the final product. The latter results carry significant implications for the modern business and public policy.

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ArticleSocial discounting rate is negatively correlated with fluid intelligence Personality and Individual Differences Suggested Citation: Osiński, Jerzy; Ostaszewski, Paweł; Karbowski, Adam (2014) : Social discounting rate is negatively correlated with fluid intelligence, Personality and Individual Differences, ISSN 0191-8869, Elsevier, Amsterdam, Vol. 59, pp. 44-49, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2013 The purpose of the study was to verify a hypothesis, inspired by the handicap principle, of a positive relationship between subjective value of a hypothetical monetary reward shared with others and the level of fluid intelligence. Manipulation involved the amount of reward to be shared (small vs. large amount) and subject's relationship to recipients (related vs. unrelated). As expected, a positive correlation was found between the subjective value of a reward to be shared with others, measured as the area under the curve for the discounting function and Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices scores, but the relationship was only present for rewards shared with relatives. In addition, participants who made altruistic choices in all items scored higher in RPM than those who were not as consistent.The implications of results for the evolutionary interpretation of the relationship between intelligence and altruism are discussed.

The goal of this paper is to present a formal model of firm innovation that simultaneously analyzes innovation factors characteristic to the Schumpeterian strand of industrial organization literature and the know-how strand. Corporate R&D intensity serves here as an input measure of firm innovation. R&D intensity can be defined as a ratio of firm’s R&D spending to the firm’s sales (total revenues). On the basis of formal analysis it is found that R&D intensity is fully determined by three complementary factors, i.e. a firm’s technological competence (supply-side factor), consumer preference for quality and price of a product (demand-side factor), as well as a moderator factor associated with the knowledge spillovers, which occur between competing firms in the industry. Since the above factors are expressed in terms of elasticities, the presented model is called an elasticity-based model of firm innovation. Further, within the model framework, it is shown how horizontal R&D cooperation alleviates the free-rider problem that can discourage a firm’s innovation activities. It is next postulated that horizontal R&D cooperation can be effectively treated as a complementary tool (to such traditional solutions as patent protection and public research subsidies) for solving the problem of negative externalities in an industry with pervasive knowledge spillovers.