The recent rise in university-industry partnerships has stimulated an important public policy debate regarding how these relationships affect fundamental research. In this paper, we examine the antecedents and consequences of policies to promote university-industry alliances. Although the preliminary evidence appears to suggest that these partnerships have not had a deleterious effect on the quantity and quality of basic research, some legitimate concerns have been raised about these activities that require additional analysis. We conclude that additional research is needed to provide a more accurate assessment of the optimal level of commercialisation.
There are few industries in modern market economies that do not manufacture differentiated products. This book provides a systematic explanation and analysis of the widespread prevalence of this important category of products. The authors concentrate on models in which product selection is endogenous. In the first four chapters they consider models that try to predict the level of product differentiation that would emerge in situations of market equilibrium. These market equilibria with differentiated products are characterised and then compared with social welfare optima. Particular attention is paid to the distinction between horizontal and vertical differentiation as well as to the related issues of product quality and durability. This book brings together the most important theoretical contributions to these topics in a succinct and coherent manner. One of its major strengths is the way in which it carefully sets out the basic intuition behind the formal results. It will be useful to advanced undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in industrial economics and microeconomic theory.
The paper presents a non-tournament model of process innovation with spillovers in the R&D process when firms engage in Cournot competition in the product market. It is shown that careful modelling of information-sharing and coordination of research activities leads to the conclusion that a Research Joint Venture (RJV) will economize on scarce R&D resources. There is an analysis of the effects of R&D cooperation, in the form of an RJV, on the organization of R&D, i.e. the efficient number of research labs. R&D expenditure, which precedes production, results in lower unit costs. R&D is modelled as a two-stage process: in the first stage, firms incur expenditure that will generate new knowledge, while in the second stage this knowledge is employed to reduce unit costs. A distinction is made between single and complementary research paths. It is shown that the RJV will operate one lab in the case of a single research path exploiting its coordination advantage. In the case of complementary research paths the number of labs the RJV will operate crucially depends on the stage of the R&D process at which diminishing returns occur: it will operate both labs when diminishing returns occur at the first stage (creation of knowledge), while it will be indifferent as to the number of labs, one or two, when diminishing returns occur in the second stage (cost reduction).
We address the following question: how does a higher education funding system influence the trade-off that universities make between research and teaching? We do so by constructing a model that allows universities to choose actively the quality of their teaching and research when faced with different funding systems characterised by the pivotal role of the university funding budget constraint. In particular, we derive the feasible sets that face universities under such systems and show how, as the parameters of the system (the research block grant element, the research quality premium and the incentives-triggering quality threshold) are varied, the nature of the university system itself changes. Different 'cultures' of the university system emerge such as the 'research elite' and the 'binary divide'.
Special Issue Quasi Markets in EducationJEL I21, I22, I23
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.