I investigate the problem of delegating an investment effort when it is not known in advance which firm is most efficient, or whether the investment should be made at all. The motivating problem is that of commissioning R instead of relying on patent incentives. Firms have different private...

The paper shows that competitive forces in club economies lead to admissions prices that can be decomposed as linear prices on externality-producing attributes, where each member pays the same amount per unit attribute contributed. The externalities prices are sufficient to cover the costs of...

Our objective in this paper is to review what economists have said about incentive schemes to promote R&D, including intellectual property. While we focus on environments in which other forms of protection are not available, we note that other protections can obviate the need for any formal...

Intellectual property treaties have two main types of provisions: national treatment of foreign inventors, and harmonization of protections. I characterize the circumstances in which countries would want to treat foreign inventors the same as national inventors. I then argue that national...

We show that exhaustion of blocking opportunities is a sufficient condition such that every allocation in the core of a replicated club economy can be decentralized as a competitive equilibrium, and that a weaker condition efficient scale is a necessary condition such that any allocation in the...

We investigate how liability rules and property rules affect the incentives to invest in research tools. We argue that it is hard to deter infringement under any of the enforcement regimes available. However, counterintuitively, a credible threat of infringement can actually be beneficial to the...