文章基本信息

标题：Income inequalities and innovation by incumbents
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作者：Hélène Latzer†
期刊名称：Discussion Paper / Département des Sciences Économiques de l'Université Catholique de Louvain
印刷版ISSN：1379-244X
出版年度：2010
卷号：1
出版社：Université catholique de Louvain
摘要：Our paper presents a new rationale for innovation by incumbents. We show that the possibility to price-discriminate between consumers having different levels of wealth is a sufficient incentive for the industry leader to overcome the Arrow (1962) effect and keep investing in R&D, even in the absence of any incumbent advantage in the R&D field. We model an economy composed of two distinct groups of consumers, differing in their wealth endowment and subject to non-homothetic preferences, ob- tained through unit consumption of the quality good. We demonstrate that in such a framework, there exists a unique steady state equilibrium with positive innovation rates of both incumbents and challengers. Beyond its novelty, this result then also al- lows us to analyze the effect of the extent of income inequalities on both the challenger and incumbent innovation rates, and by extension on the economic growth rate. We demonstrate that a higher share of the population being poor is detrimental to the rate of economic growth, while a redistribution of wealth from rich to poor consumers increases the challenger innovation rate and has ambiguous effects on the incumbent’s investment in R&D.
关键词：Growth, Innovation, Income inequalities.