4: An Assessment of the National Cooperative Research Act

As I wrote in Chapter 1, the stated purpose of the NCRA was¹:

Based on the stated purpose of the NCRA, the questions that I raise in this chapter are:

Starting with the last bulleted question, the answer is an emphatic YES. Although the DOJ’s Antitrust Guide Concerning Research Joint Ventures was released in 1980 at the direction of President Carter through his 1978 Domestic Policy Review in anticipation of the NCRA of 1984, the principles in the Antitrust Guide definitely represent a modification of antitrust laws that is still being practiced.

A student of program assessment and program evaluation will notice that I chose to use the term assessment in the title of this chapter rather than the term evaluation. Following Link and Scott (2011), the term assessment refers to the policy criterion of effectiveness, and the related question that one then asks is: Have the NCRA and its 1993 amendment, the NCRPA, met their stated goals and objectives, and have designated outputs been achieved? The term evaluation refers to the policy criterion of efficiency, and the question that one then asks is: How do the social benefits associated with the program compare to the social costs?