Prior knowledge management research has paid limited attention to the external institutional determinants of firm knowledge search behavior. This paper aims to examine how an increase in the strength of intellectual property protection reshapes firms’ knowledge search behavior, identifies two transmission channels, namely collaboration willingness and R&D uncertainty, and characterizes the boundary conditions of the policy effect.
Employing the Intellectual Property Demonstration City Policy as an exogenous institutional shock, this study is based on a panel of Chinese A-share non-financial listed firms over 2014–2023 and uses a staggered two-way fixed effects difference-in-differences design.
The Intellectual Property Demonstration City Policy significantly broadens firms’ knowledge search breadth. The main effect remains robust across alternative fixed-effects specifications, heterogeneous treatment-effects estimators, entropy balancing and propensity score matching. The policy effect operates through two independent channels, namely stronger industry-university-research collaboration willingness and reduced R&D uncertainty. The effect is markedly stronger among firms more dependent on formal intellectual property institutions, including those with prior industry-university-research collaboration experience, those in low-tech industries and non-state-owned enterprises. These patterns collectively point to institutional dependence as a unified boundary condition.
This paper extends the appropriability regime theory from innovation outputs to firm knowledge search behavior and proposes the concept of institutional dependence to delineate the boundary of the policy effect. The findings provide an empirical basis for differentiated intellectual property policy design.
