Bhattacharya, Jay; Packalen, Mikko - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2008
an induced innovation externality. This alternative mechanism, by contrast, causes people to devote an inefficiently high … level of self-protection. As an empirical example of this externality, we analyze the innovation induced by the obesity … epidemic. Obesity is associated with an increase in the incidence of many diseases. The induced innovation hypothesis is that …