ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to investigate the impacts of research and development (R&D) costs on the effectiveness of an International Technology Agreement (ITA). It focuses on R&D costs: each country decides whether to join an ITA, signatories collectively decide whether to conduct R&D, and each country independently decides whether to adopt the technology. There is a threshold regarding R&D costs that determines an ITA's effectiveness: when R&D costs are below the threshold, the ITA is functional; else, it is not. Moreover, the threshold is an increasing function of the number of countries that share the resource: the value of the threshold is higher in the context of global environmental issues compared with local environmental issues. The number of signatories has a U-shaped relationship with R&D costs: when R&D costs are either sufficiently low or high, many countries rationally join an ITA.
