What is the best way to reward innovation? While prizes avoid deadweight loss, intellectual property selects high social surplus projects. Optimal innovation policy thus trades off the ex-ante screening benefit and the ex-post distortion. It solves a multidimensional screening problem in the...

A firm must decide whether to launch a new product. A launch implies considerable fixed costs, so the firm would like to assess downstream demand before it decides. We study under which conditions a potential buyer would be willing to reveal his willingness to pay under different pricing...

Technological innovations are inherently problematic (risky, uncertain, possess public goods properties (enhances free-riding since it is easy to steal), but once they succeed, they create negative externalities for incumbents in the form of economic resources redistribution. Economic resources...

The challenge of achieving socially optimal incentives for innovation in public goods faces twin market failures: a market failure to adequately promote public goods invention and a market failure to implement innovative public goods once developed. Though innovation in private goods sometimes...

I investigate a simple model of advance-purchase contracts as a mode of financing costly projects. An entrepreneur has to meet some capital requirement in order to start production and sell the related good to a limited number of potential buyers who are privately informed about their...

I investigate a simple model of advance-purchase contracts as a mode of financing costly projects. The analysis can easily be reinterpreted as a model of the monopolistic provision of excludable public goods under private information. An entrepreneur has to meet some capital requirement in order...

Incentivizing innovation through buyouts may alleviate the social costs associated with patent power, but the political economy and feasibility of this potentially important financing mechanism have been understudied. We study an international setting of countries with different innovation and...

The literature on patent buyouts has focused on single-economy settings, where buyouts are welfare improving relative to patents unless there are frictions such as imperfect information or commitment problems. We expand the analysis to a world with two heterogeneous countries featuring different...