Some like it free: Innovators' Strategic use of Disclosure to slow down Competition
研究了创新者为何免费公开知识产权，发现这能诱导对手等待模仿而非同时投资创新，从而减缓竞争压力；同时模仿者可能不希望自由获取过多知识，否则会降低创新者的研发动力。
Abstract Why do some innovators freely reveal their intellectual property? This empirical puzzle has been a focal point of debate in the R&D literature. We show that innovators may share proprietary technology with rivals for free—even if it does not directly benefit them—to slow down competition. By disclosing IP, innovators indirectly induce rivals to wait and imitate instead of concurrently investing in innovation, which alleviates competitive pressure. In contrast with the classical strategy view, our paper also shows that imitators may not always benefit from interfirm knowledge spillovers. Specifically, imitators may want to limit the know‐how that they can freely appropriate from innovators. Otherwise, innovators have fewer incentives to quickly develop new technologies, which, ultimately, reduces the pace and profits of imitation. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.