We model and experimentally evaluate the trade-off between innovation and imitation commonly faced by firms and individuals. Innovation involves searching for a high payoff opportunity, but paying a cost to do so. Imitation involves avoiding the search cost and copying the most successful payoff...

At any given point in time, the collection of assets existing in the economy is observable. Each asset is a function of a set of contingencies. The union taken over all assets of these contingencies is what we call the set of publicly known states. An innovation is a set of states that are not...

The U.S. promotes and produces innovation through a wide range of interdependent institutions, ranging from the grant of an intellectual property right to the direct funding of research. The justification for using multiple instruments is intuitively rather simple: no single institution would...

At any given point in time, the collection of assets existing in the economy is observable. Each asset is a function of a set of contingencies. The union taken over all assets of these contingencies is what we call the set of publicly known states. An innovation is a set of states that are not...

We study the effects of a field experiment designed to motivate employee ideas, at a large technology company. Employees were encouraged to submit ideas on process and product improvements via an online system. In the experiment, the company randomized 19 account teams into treatment and control...