We study the performance effects of payment schemes for freelancers offering services on an online platform in an RCT. Under the initial scheme, the firm pays workers a pure sales commission. The intervention reduces the commission rate and adds a fixed payment per processed order to insure...

This paper analyses the causal impact of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) on pharmaceutical innovation in a panel of 74 countries. The identification strategy exploits the different timing across countries of two sets of IPR reforms. Domestic innovation is measured as citation-weighted...

Encouraging inventors to disclose new inventions is an important economic justification for the patent system, yet the technical information contained in patent applications is often inadequate and unclear. This paper proposes a novel approach to measure disclosure in patent applications using...

We examine the relationship between inheritance rules and voter turnout. Inheritance rules are measured by entailed farms in South Tyrol: land properties whose inheritance is regulated by a law similar to the right of primogeniture. Using data for municipalities between 1998 and 2010, we show...

Intellectual property rights are fundamental to how economies organize innovation and steer the diffusion of knowledge. Copyright law, in particular, has developed constantly to keep up with emerging technologies and the interests of creators, consumers, and intermediaries of the different...

Human-created works represent critical data inputs to artificial intelligence (AI). Strategic behaviour can play a major role for AI training datasets, be it in limiting access to existing works or in deciding which types of new works to create or whether to create new works at all. We examine...

Cultural and institutional differences among nations may result in differences in the ratios of marginal costs of goods in autarchy and thus be the basis of specialization and comparative advantage, as long as these differences are not eliminated by trade. We provide an evolutionary model of...

We study a situation where two players first choose a sharing rule, then invest into a joint production process, and then split joint benefits. We investigate how social preferences determine investments. In our experiment we find that even the materially disadvantaged player cares more for...

We model non-binding retail-price recommendations (RPRs) as a communication device facilitating coordination in vertical supply relations. Assuming both repeated vertical trade and asymmetric information about production costs, we show that RPRs may be part of a relational contract,...

Can formal contracts help resolving the holdup problem? We address this important question by studying the holdup problem in repeated transactions between a seller and a buyer in which the seller can make relation-specific investments in each period. In contrast to previous findings, we...