This paper investigates the impact of royalty revision on incentives and profits in a two-stage (research and development (R&D) stage and marketing stage) alliance with a marketer and an innovator. The marketer offers royalty contracts to the innovator. We find that the potential for royalty...

Organizations increasingly seek solutions to their open-ended design problems by employing a contest approach in which search over a solution space is delegated to outside agents. We study this new class of problems, which are costly to specify, pose credibility issues for the focal firm, and...

In a first survey of its type, we measure development and modification of consumer products by product users in a representative sample of 1,173 UK consumers age 18 and older. We estimate this previously unmeasured type of household sector innovation to be quite large: 6.1% of UK...

The introduction of new technologies in existing administrative and technical organizations usually represents a significant investment in equipment and training. A prudent manager will attempt to acquire the equipment needed fast enough to encourage its use while avoiding the inefficiencies of...

This paper investigates equilibrium R&D investment strategies of firms endowed with different innovation potentials. To address this issue, this paper permits two stages of innovation and develops a simple stochastic game model involving two firms. It is shown that in equilibrium, a leader in...

In this paper we present data concerning the accuracy of firm's forecasts of engineering employment and suggest a simple model that may be of use in improving their accuracy. The results, which pertain to 54 firms in the aerospace, electronics, chemical, and oil industries, should be of use to...

A model of the resource allocation behavior of a group of firms demonstrates that unaided industry allocation to basic (inappropriable) research is suboptimal. Furthermore, provision of seed money is generally counterproductive, while the provision of a matching subsidy is not very...

Economists studying innovation and technological change have made significant progress toward understanding firms' profit incentives as drivers of innovation. However, innovative performance in firms should also depend heavily on the pecuniary and nonpecuniary motives of the employees actually...

The practice of having Ph.D. graduates employed by the university that trained them, commonly called "academic inbreeding," has long been suspected to be damaging to scholarly practices and achievement. Despite this perception, existing work on academic inbreeding is scarce and mostly...

In a recent paper we showed that unaided industry allocation to basic (inappropriable) research is suboptimal and that in stimulating this allocation, provision of government seed money is generally counterproductive, while the provision of matching subsidies is not cost-efficient. Here we...