Inter-corporate Top Managers’ Ties And R&D Investment Decision-making

The influencing factors of R&D investment has been hot issues in academic research, the domestic and foreign scholars study the influencing factors of R&D investment from four dimensions of macroeconomic policy, industry, corporates and executives characterized, but existing studies ignore the factor of the decision makers’social relations which maybe have an influence on the R&D investment decisions. Due to the R&D investment decision-making itself is filled with high uncertainty, when the bounded rationality executives limited by the existing cognitive framework make R&D investment decisions, they may not follow the program search and selection of the general decision-making process, but to depend on the existing information channels and reference for decision-making. Inter-corporate Top Managers’Ties maybe a reliable channel of information, the associated corporate’s R&D investment decisions may become an ideal reference for R&D decision-making. In this paper, we try to find out how Inter-corporate Top Managers’Ties affect R&D investment decision-making in the perspective of Inter-corporate network. Based on the210pairs data of China’s A-share listed companies from2007to2010, we find that:First, the R&D investment intensity of coupling corporate (the relationship of associated corporates is formed by Inter-corporate Top Managers’Ties) have a significant positive impact on the target corporate’s R&D investment intensity. Second, if the coupling corporate and the target corporate are in the same industry or the same region, the positive correlation between the coupling and the target corporate will be stronger.The article discusses whether the Inter-corporate Top Managers’Ties will have an effect on the R&D investment intensity, it reveals the Inter-corporate Top Managers’Ties a kind of network relationship between corporates will influence the R&D investment activities, we provide a new perspective of empirical test to understand the important influencing factors of research and development activities. We enrich the study of the characteristic angle of the executives’social relations to explore the influencing factors of R&D investment, this new perspective is a useful complement to the existing macroeconomic policies, industry and corporate level perspective. The article finds that the coupling corporate’s R&D investment intensity significantly affect the target corporate R&D investment intensity, and further the moderating effect in the same industry and the same region, it will help companies better understand the mechanism of the R&D investment. These findings not only in theory show that the relationship of inter-corporate network will affect the corporate R&D investment decision-making, but also provided useful insights for R&D investment decision-making in practice.