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 aca-demic and business circles in the last couple of decades. Several empirical studies have concentrated on the firms’ incentives to participate in these col-laborations. This paper presents an alternative approach to R&D collabora-tions using an evolutionary, multi-agent based and sector-level R&D model. The model simulates the evolution of an R&D driven market composed of profit-driven firms and boundedly rational consumers to explore frequently discussed research questions in the relevant empirical literature. This model-ing exercise will extend beyond a basic confirmation/rejection of these re-search questions by showing that the way a firm is defined as an R&D col-laborator has significant effects on research results. A clear inference based on these outcomes is that the research results of the empirical studies on re-search joint ventures should be interpreted with some caution in regard to the chosen method of defining collaborator firms.