Essay on the economic logic of horizontal cooperation in research and development.

Summary The imperfect appropriation of the benefits of r&d leads firms to underinvest in research. However, a diffusion of r&d results is favourable to a rapid technological progress. Horizontal ex-ante R&D cooperation agreements help to remedy this shortcoming. Nevertheless, the incentives to cheat within the agreement compromise the emergence and stability of R&D cooperation. In order to analyze more precisely these opportunistic behaviors, we propose two theoretical models. The first model highlights the negative influence of technological spillovers on the stability of cooperation. The second model shows that endogenous uncertainty allows inter-firm cooperation even when the horizon of interactions is finite, provided that firms value the future. The previous results are based on the fact that cooperation has been postulated. However, it seems necessary to question the construction of this cooperation in R&D by taking into account the implementation of collective knowledge (tacit knowledge). This work leads us to consider a learning process of an organizational nature and to propose a modelization of it. We show that this learning process has the property of ensuring flexibility of decision to the firms in terms of investment in r&d, and thus, allows to restore the incentives to innovate.