Research On The Legal Environment For Research Joint Ventures (RJVs) From The Angle Of Antitrust Law

In recent years, the world economy has gradually moved from capital-intensive competition to technology-intensive competition, technological innovation has become a crucial determinant in the success of a country’s economy. As application of technological innovation and information technology has been used in a broader area, research depending on a single company or a singe research institute is not sufficient to the increasing need of technology development. It is especially difficult for companies that heavily rely on technological innovation to endure the high risky R&D costs. Thus, research joint ventures (RJVs) emerged as an effective cooperative innovation organization form to integrate research resources and reduce investment risk. The advantages of RJVs are twofold. First, RJVs solve research underinvestment problem by internalizing the strong externality of technology. Second, RJVs help to optimally allocate advantageous resources by connecting companies, research institutes and universities to work collaboratively.As a new cooperative innovation mode, RJVs promote healthy growth of economy, but, at the meantime, it is criticized as bringing anti-competition behavior, such as power abuse. Many countries have enacted antitrust law to constrain RJVs’ monopoly behavior, encourage market competition, and maintain the market health. Antitrust law provides a fair and free competition market by restraining RJVs’advantages of monopoly and exclusiveness.Though China’s Antitrust law became effective in 2008, provisions related to RJVs are only in a fledging period in terms of both legislation and enforcement. The incompleteness of provisions related to RJVs has led to an urgent need of improvement of antitrust law. Based on the current situation of RJVs in China, this paper analyzes the relationship between economic benefit of RJVs and antitrust law, studies the examination standards of RJVs, and discusses the histories and experiences of RJVs-related antitrust law in various countries and makes a comparison to China’s situation. At the end, this paper provides some insights of improvements of Chinese Antitrust law in order to help the future development of RJVs in China.