研討日期

20051224日上午10:00 ~ 13:00

研討地點

台大社會科學院第二教室

討論文獻

題目

作者

文獻出處

Imitative Competition and Product Innovation in a Duopoly Model

Lynne Pepall

Economica,

New Series, Vol. 64, No. 254 (May, 1997), 265-279

報告人

王胤杰

參加人員

黃鴻、梁文榮、王胤杰、陳盈秀、曾靜枝、蔡明芳、林晏如、李家銘、許淑英、涂光億、彭正浩、張民忠、周冰瑤

討論提要

The paper investigates imitative competition in a two-stage game of strategic product choice in a vertically differentiated market.  The innovator chooses its product strategy anticipating the subsequent entry of a rival firm.  The rival firm chooses the degree to which it is profitable to differentiate its product from the innovator.  It has the second mover advantage that its costs are lower the more closely it copies the innovator’s product.  But against this advantage is the drawback that the more similar the two products are, the more intense is the price competition between the two firms.  The trade-off between imitation and differentiation is affected by the degree of consumer heterogeneity in the market.  Consumers differ by income.  The relationship between the incentive to imitate and the distribution of income is important, particularly in evaluating the welfare effects of two different policy responses, patent policy and cooperative alliances.

結論

The regime of development cost (K) and income of the highest consumer play an important part in the analysis.  By analyzing the regime, we find that when K is really large, there is no incentive to innovate whereas K is small enough, then the best response for the late entrant is to differentiate his product.   We also see that when income distribution is relatively poor or uneven, or it is relatively wealthy or even, then the tight patent policy can bring a higher welfare.  And when income distribution is in the middle range, then a cooperative alliances policy brings a higher welfare.

延伸研究

(1)        The imitation cost which the author applied may be difficult to find in the real world.  Maybe we can try to set a new cost function that the cost should increase as the imitator producing a closer one.

(2)        Under the tight patent policy, we can try to analyze the issue again where this patent only increases the imitator’s cost rather than deter the imitator from entering the market.

(3)        We can try to analyze this model in the uncovered market setting.

(4)        We can try to relate the income distribution to the Gini Coefficient.