Competition and innovation in product quality: Theory and evidence from Eastern Europe and Central Asia

Abstract

This paper examines how the degree of competition affects incentives to innovate in product quality in a symmetric Cournot oligopolistic model. We model product quality in a quality-ladder framework and find an inverted-U shaped relationship between the number of firms in an industry and R&D efforts in innovation. We test this theoretical prediction using firm-level data for Eastern European and Central Asian countries from the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey and find strong support for it. © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.