The paper attempts a critical assessment of both the theory and the empirical evidence on the role of appropriability and in particular of Intellectual Property Right (IPR) as incentives for technological innovation. We start with a critical discussion of the standard justification of the...

Social choice models usually assume that choice is among pre-defined, uni-dimensional and "simple" objects. Very often, on the contrary, choice is among multifeatured and "complex" objects: a candidate in an election stands for an electoral programme which is a complex bundle of many...