Stability in the patent race contest of Lee and Wilde

Summary. To determine how expenditure and profits vary with the number of firms in the patent race contest of Lee and Wilde, it is traditional to impose an ad-hoc stability condition on the best response function. This paper relates the stability condition to the standard myopic adjustment mechanism and shows that a concave hazard rate function with non- increasing hazard rate elasticity is sufficient for the analysis. We provide examples and reveal additional qualitative properties of the Lee and Wilde model. Received: November 15, 1996; revised version: March 25, 1998