This paper provides an argument for the advantage of a preference for identity-consistent behaviour from an evolutionary point of view. Within a stylised model of social interaction, we show that the development of cooperative social norms is greatly facilitated if the agents of the society...

eBay’s feedback mechanism is considered crucial to establishing and maintaining trust on the world’s largest trading platform. The effects of a user’s reputation on the probability of sale and on prices are at the center of a large number of studies. More recent theoretical...

We analyze the duration of the patent examination process at the European Patent Office (EPO). Our data contain information related to the patent’s economic and technical relevance, EPO capacity and workload as well as novel citation measures which are derived from the EPO’s search...

This paper derives conditions under which reputation enables certifiers to resist capture. These conditions alone have strong implications for the industrial organization of certification markets: 1) Honest certification requires high prices that may even exceed the static monopoly price. 2)...

We present a field experiment to assess the effect of own and peer wage variations on actual work effort of employees with hourly wages. Work effort neither reacts to an increase of the own wage, nor to a positive or negative peer comparison. This result seems at odds with numerous laboratory...

Where product innovation requires several complementary patents, fragmented property rights can be a factor that limits firms’ willingness to invest in the development and commercialization of new products. This paper studies multiple simultaneous R&D contests for complementary patents...

At least two: the reputation of their brand and a reputation for being tough on imitators of this brand. Sustaining a brand requires both investment in its reputation amongst consumers and the defence of the brand against followers that infringe upon it. I study the defence of trade marks...

updated version of paper no 55

This paper investigates how patent applications and grants held by new ventures improve their ability to attract venture capital (VC) financing. We argue that investors are faced with considerable uncertainty and therefore rely on patents as signals when trying to assess the prospects of...