Resumen de Innovative activity and sunk cost

Todd R. Kaplan, Israel Luski, David Wettstein

• We analyze innovative activity in a general framework with time-dependent rewards and sunk costs. When firms are identical, innovation is delayed by an increase in the number of firms or a decrease in the size of the reward. When one firm has higher profit potential, it is more likely to innovate first. Our framework generalizes an all-pay auction; however, we show that under certain conditions there is qualitatively different equilibrium behavior.