Financial support from research projects 2009SGR-169, ECO2009-7616, and Consolider-Ingenio 2010 (Xavier Martinez-Giralt), 2009SGR-00600 and SEJ2008-01850/ECON (Rosella Nicoli)

This paper discusses a novel argument to interpret the importance of thinking of collaborative partnerships in pre-competitive agreements. To do so, we adopt a dynamic iterative process to model technology diffusion between the partners of an agreement. We find that the success of an agreement of a given length hinges around identifying the suitable efficient combinations of the initial technological endowments of partners. As the time horizon of the agreement expands, the probability of identifying a suitable partner decreases, thus justifying the prevalence of short-horizon R&D agreements