We compare performance in a word based creativity task under three incentive schemes: a flat fee, a linear payment and a tournament. Furthermore, we also compare performance under two control tasks (Raven's advanced progressive matrices or a number-adding task) with the same treatments. In all...

This paper explores the conditions under which decentralization and fiscal competition lead to a policy of subsidizing cultural activities. A theoretical analysis discusses these subsidies as a form of local public good provision which makes a city more attractive to highly educated individuals....

It has been argued that monetary incentives restrain individual creativity and hamper performance in jobs requiring out of the box thinking. This paper reports from an experiment designed to test if the negative incentive effect is present also when individuals work together to solve such...

Management research has long focused on the theory of the firm, studying for-profit organizations that produce privately owned resources based on central authority and within well-defined boundaries. In recent times, a new kind of enterprise has emerged that we call Community Enterprises. They...

We empirically investigate whether the persistence of politicians in political institutions affects the innovation activity of firms. We use 12,000 firm-level observations from three waves of the Italian Observatory over Small and Medium Enterprises, and introduce a measure of political...

We provide a theoretical framework to contribute to the current debate regarding the tendency of pharmaceutical companies to direct their R&D toward marketing products that are “follow-on” drugs of already existing drugs, rather than toward the development of breakthrough drugs. We construct...

In this paper, we offer a novel explanation to the surge in patenting bserved during the last years. With low patentability standards at PTOs (Patent and Trademark Offices awarding so-called bad patents), not only “false innovators” have the chance of being granted patents but also, and more...

We investigate the effect of better access to foreign markets on innovation strategies of multi-product firms in industries with different scope for product differentiation. Industry-specific demand and cost linkages induce a distinction between the returns to innovation. In differentiated...

Environmental regulations have consistently been found to spur innovation in ‘clean' technologies, with one significant exception. Past cap-and-trade programs have encouraged adoption of existing pollution control technologies, but had little effect on innovation. Several explanations have...

In this paper we examine the importance of financial and other obstacles to innovation in the Netherlands using statistical information from the CIS 3.5 innovation survey. We report results on the effect of these obstacles on the firms' decision to abandon, prematurely stop, seriously slow down,...