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The paper clarifies how sunk costs can lead a rational incumbent to innovate less than an entrant. It also demonstrates that competition among incumbents yields less adoption of new and more efficient production technology than competition which includes entrants. The results suggest that policy promoting adoption of next-generation production technology should distinguish among firms based on their sunk costs in current-generation technology and encourage entry by industry outsiders such as startups or firms from other industries.

Competition among profit-seeking firms in an oligopolistic industry inherently generates incentives for firms to commit to maximize a performance metric other than profit.We briefly review the underlying theory,analyze its ramifications in a Cournot duopoly,and consider feasibility constraints from the perspective of strategic management.

An outside inventor of a new production process seeks to license it to Cournot duopolists which have unequal ex ante costs. Distinguishing "leading-edge" innovations (new cost below both firms' costs) from "catch-up" innovations (new cost between the two firms' costs), we compare the equilibria of two license-selling mechanisms: exclusive license auction and non-exclusive price-setting. In contrast to the often-studied case of an innovation that reduces the cost of any licensee by the same amount, we show that licensing of a new process may attenuate the ex ante cost asymmetry, allow the inefficient firm to leapfrog its competitor, and raise the licensee's net profits.

A parsimonious model is used to explore the risk-bearing decision under a payoff structure that emphasizes relative performance. Equilibrium betting amounts are derived for players who start with unequal endowments and face a lottery that offers either a positive or negative expected return. If the lottery offers negative expected return, disadvantaged players are willing to risk a portion of their endowment, and this induces advantaged players to also gamble, defensively. Although there are equilibria in which the advantaged preemptively gamble more than the disadvantaged, in the robust equilibrium it is the disadvantaged who make the larger bets. If the lottery offers positive expected return, there are equilibria in which the advantaged invest less than the disadvantaged, but full investment by all players is a more robust equilibrium.