Title
Contract design for technology sharing between two farmers
Abstract
Technology sharing among farmers has become common but controversial in recent years. To address it, we consider two farmers engaged in Cournot competition to investigate motivations of technology sharing and provide suggestions on contract design. One farmer (a licensor) has developed some technology and decides whether to share technology with the other farmer (a licensee). The licensee chooses whether to buy technology under a fixed-rate contract or a royalty-fee contract. We propose a technology sharing ratio between two farmers to characterize the degree of technology sharing. We find a win–win outcome for both farmers when the technology sharing ratio is higher than a threshold under the fixed-fee contract. While under the royalty-fee contract, the licensor only shares technology with an additional constraint that they have similar production costs. When the licensor can design contracts, he prefers the royalty-fee contract to the fixed-fee contract. We further interpret why the licensor may not benefit more under the two-part tariff contract than the fixed-fee or the royalty-fee contract. Moreover, we find that in supply chain settings, a win–win outcome for both farmers exists if and only if the technology sharing ratio is smaller than a threshold under the fixed-fee contract while technology sharing will not be realized under the royalty-fee contract. Finally, we show that the strategy of whether to share technology is robust to yield uncertainty, and both the licensor and licensee may benefit more from technology sharing because of yield uncertainty.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1007/s10479-022-04576-9
Annals of Operations Research
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Technology sharing, Fixed-fee contract, Royalty-fee contract, Supply chain management, Yield uncertainty
Journal
314
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
0254-5330
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
13
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Qing Zhang100.34
Juan Li220.71
Tiaojun Xiao329328.31