The Value Of A New Idea: Knowledge Transmission, Workers~ Mobility And Market Structure

The authors model the process of knowledge transmission among firms via workers' mobility as a multi-stage game. In the setup an idea to be realized needs that the agent informed about the idea recruits another agent from a pool of uninformed people. This constraint generates a recursive effect of knowledge transmission via players' mobility across firms which affect simultaneously the players' payoffs and the number of active players engaged in market competition. They provide sufficient conditions for the game to possess a unique symmetric subgame perfect equilibrium in which all incumbent players deter the exit of their collaborators.