Research Joint Ventures in an R&D Driven Market with Evolving Consumer Preferences: An Evolutionary Multi-agent Based Modeling Approach

R&D collaborations have increasingly attracted the attention of both academic and business circles in the last couple of decades. Several empirical studies have concentrated on the firms’ incentives to participate in these collaborations. This paper presents an alternative approach to R&D collaborations using an evolutionary, multi-agent based and sector-level R&D model. The model will firstly be used to simulate the evolution of an R&D driven market composed of profit-driven firms and boundedly rational consumers. Next, frequently discussed research questions in the relevant empirical literature will be explored. This modeling exercise will extend beyond a basic confirmation/rejection of these research questions by showing that the way a firm is defined as an R&D collaborator has significant effects on research results. A clear inference based on these outcomes is that the research results of the empirical studies on research joint ventures should be interpreted with some caution in regard to the chosen method of defining collaborator firms.