Two centuries ago the world’s economy stood at the present level of Chad. Two centuries later the world supports more than six-and-half times more people. Starvation worldwide is at an all-time low, and falling. Literacy and life expectancy are at all-time highs, and rising. How did average...

A principal uses security bid auctions to award an incentive contract to one among several agents, in the presence of hidden action and hidden information. Securities range from cash to equity and call options. “Steeper†securities are better surplus extractors that narrow the gap...

“Commercialization” and “monetization” dance with stage theories from Smith to modern growth theory. The sheer growth of traded or the sheer growth of money, though, do not an Industrial Revolution make. The ill-named “Price Revolution,” for example, came from American gold, not from...

Why did the North-Sea folk suddenly get so rich, get so much cargo? The answers seems not to be that supply was brought into equilibrium with demand---the curves were moving out at breakneck pace. Reallocation is not the key. Language is, with its inherent creativity. The Bourgeois Revaluation...

We consider a licensing mechanism for process innovations that combines a license auction with royalty contracts to those who lose the auction. Firms’ bids are dual signals of their cost reductions: the winning bid signals the own cost reduction to rival oligopolists, whereas the losing...

This paper reconsiders the licensing of a common value innovation to a downstream duopoly, assuming a dual licensing scheme that combines a first-price license auction with royalty contracts for losers. Prior to bidding firms observe imperfect signals of the expected cost reduction; after the...

It is a materialist prejudice common in scholarship from 1890 to 1980 that economic results must have economic causes. But ideas caused the modern world. The point can be made by looking through each of the materialist explanations, from the “original accumulation” favored by early Marxist...

The literature on R&D contests implicitly assumes that contestants submit their innovation regardless of its value. This ignores a potential adverse selection problem. The present paper analyzes the procurement of innovations when the procurer cannot commit to never bargain with innovators who...

This paper revisits the licensing of a non–drastic process innovation by an outside innovator to a Cournot oligopoly. We propose a new mechanism that combines a restrictive license auction with royalty licensing. This mechanism is more profitable than standard license auctions, auctioning...

Thrift was not the cause of the Industrial Revolution or its astonishing follow on. For one thing, every human society must practice thrift, and pre-industrial Europe, with its low yield-seed ratios, did so on a big scale. British thrift during the Industrial Revolution, for another, was rather...