关键词: 竞合研发, 多智能体仿真, 合作策略, 市场环境

Abstract: Many enterprises adopt the R&D coopetition to cope with the increasingly fierce market competition. The R&D coopetition is different from the conventional R&D cooperation as it involves cooperations in value creation and competitions in value capture. These cooperations and competitions bring more opportunities and threats to enterprises, which makes the benefits of the R&D coopetition more uncertain. Thus, how to benefit from the R&D coopetition has become an important and complex issue in enterprise innovation strategy.
There are two problems to be solved in the study of enterprises’ R&D coopetition. First, the cooperation of value creation and the competition of value capture should be considered simultaneously. Second, although the R&D coopetition is a local behavior between the participating parties, the coopetition itself and its innovation results would interact with the industry environment in which the behavior takes place. The game model can explore the cooperation of value creation and the competition of value capture simultaneously. The multi-agent simulation system can simulate the complex scene of multi-coopetition among enterprises. Therefore, this paper focuses on the R&D coopetition in a non-oligopolistic market and establishes a bottom-up multi-agent simulation system of asymmetric game through the conceptual model, the quantitative model and simulations. The system contains several agents (enterprises) with heterogeneities of innovation capacities and cooperation preferences. These heterogeneities would further influence the formations of multi-phase coopetition network links and the direct results of their cooperation. Moreover, this system realizes the interaction mechanism between the micro agent interaction (the local value creation) and the macro market redistribution (the global value appropriation) by using the discrete choice model. The benefits of the R&D coopetition are related to both the current coopetition and the innovation results of other enterprises in the industry. Thus, the system reflects the coopetition in the highly competitive market appropriately. Then, a series of simulation experiments are designed to study the profits of enterprises with different cooperation strategies under diverse market environmental forces. These forces include industry integrity, technology replacement speed and betrayal tolerance level.
The results of the experiments show significant differences in the relative and net profits obtained by enterprises with different strategies under different industry environments. Firstly, faced with good industry integrity, rapid technological upgrading or strong social betrayal tolerance, enterprises may obtain higher returns from betrayal in coopetition easily. However, the agglomeration of enterprises with this kind of opportunism will quickly drag down the earnings of those enterprises and cause the vicious circle of the industry. Secondly, the integrity R&D coopetition realizes the integration of innovation resources and the sharing of R&D costs. Enterprises with strong innovation capacities can maintain their own advantages through the R&D coopetition, while the enterprises with weak innovation capacities can promote their relative capabilities rapidly through the R&D coopetition. These benefits are more significant in industries with slow technological upgrading. Thirdly, from the perspective of the industry, a large amount of R&D coopetition may not lead to an increase in the enterprises’ net incomes because of high R&D costs. In saturated markets, enterprises gain more market share advantages (i.e.higher relative returns) through the R&D coopetition, and the consumers get more benefits.
The results could provide guidance for enterprises to choose profitable cooperation strategies in R&D coopetition. First, in a highly competitive market, even if enterprises can temporarily benefit from opportunistic behavior, they should also fully consider its potential risks and long-term damage. Second, enterprises should raise the awareness of the importance of the R&D coopetition, especially in the industry where product upgrading is slow. Moreover, public institutions should actively promote R&D coopetition for the purpose of improving social welfare. In the future, the premise of the model could be relaxed to adapt to more realistic situations, and further comparative study under multiple situations could be extended.

Key words: R&D coopetition, multi-agent simulation, cooperation strategy, market environment