There is growing public interest in alternatives to intellectual property including, but not limited to, prizes and government grants. We argue that there is no single best mechanism for supporting research. Rather, mechanisms can only be compared within specific creative environments. We...

Open source methods for creating software rely on developers who voluntarily reveal code in the expectation that other developers will reciprocate. Open source incentives are distinct from earlier uses of intellectual property, leading to different types of inefficiencies and different biases in...

Intellectual property treaties have two main types of provisions: national treatment of foreign inventors, and harmonization of protections. I address the positive question of when countries would want to treat foreign inventors the same as domestic inventors, and how their incentive to do so...

If promotion in a hierarchy is based on a random signal of ability, rates of promotion will be affected by risk-taking. Further, the numbers and abilities of risk-takers and non-risk-takers will be different at each stage of the hierarchy, and the ratio will be changing. I show that, under mild...

For most parameter values, increased randomness about how much taxable income an auditor would assess leads to higher reported income and more revenue, When reducing randomness is costly, optimality requires some randomness in assessed taxable Income. Even if reducing randomness g costless,...

Profit on proprietary research tools is determined partly by the remedies for infringement, such as damages and injunctions. We investigate how damages under a liability rule and the opportunity for injunctions under a property rule can affect the incentives to develop research tools. We show...

As it becomes cheaper to copy and share digital content, vendors are turning to technical protections such as encryption. We argue that if protection is nevertheless imperfect, this transition will generally lower the prices of content relative to perfect legal enforcement. However, the effect...

We investigate rewards to R&D in a model where substitute ideas for innovation arrive to random recipients at random times. By foregoing investment in a current idea, society as a whole preserves an option to invest in a better idea for the same market niche, but with delay. Because successive...

For over a century, courts and commentators have struggled to find principles that reconcile patent and antitrust law, especially as to patent licensing. We interpret case law and commentary to arrive at three unifying principles for acceptable terms of license. Profit neutrality' holds that...

In a labor market hierarchy, promotions are affected by the noisiness of information about the candidates. I study the hypothesis that males are more risk taking than females, and its implications for rates of promotion and abilities of survivors. I define promotion hierarchies with and without...