New Ideas Need New Space
22 Pages Posted: 10 Jan 2000
Abstract
We develop a setting with weak intellectual property rights, where firms' boundaries, location and knowledge spillovers are endogenous. We have two main results. The first one is that, if communication costs increase with distance, entrepreneurs concerned about information leakage have a benefit from locating away from the industry center: distance is an obstacle to collusive trades between members and non-members. The second result is that we identify a trade-off for the entrepreneur between owning a facility (controlling all its characteristics) and sharing a facility with a non-member (an agent not involved in production), therefore losing control over some of its characteristics. We focus on "location" as the relevant characteristic of the facility, but location can be used as a spatial metaphor for other relevant characteristics of the facility. For the entrepreneur, sharing the facility with non-members implies that the latter, as co-owners, know the location (even if they do not have access to it). Knowledge of the location for the co-owners facilitates collusion with employees, which increases leakage. The model yields a benefit for new plants from spatial dispersion (locating at the periphery of the industry), particularly so for new plants of new firms. We relate this result with recent empirical findings on the dynamics of industry location.
JEL Classification: D23, J31, J33, L22
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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