The literature on new goods and social welfare generally assumes that innovations are developed by manufacturers. But innovation by users has been found to also be an important part of innovative activity in the economy. In this paper we explore the impact of users as a source of innovation on...

VCs prefer secrecy when searching for targets. As a result, only the investments in viable startups are disclosed but the failed ones are discarded silently. We extend the standard preemption game to explain the efficiency loss and the individual rationale of doing so. We show that secrecy...

Can being innovative help firms to shield themselves from the disruptive effects of a recession? Using data for Spanish manufacturing firms, this paper finds that innovative firms suffered considerably less compared to noninnovative firms during the Great Recession. The operating mechanism for...

We develop an overlapping generations model, where firms (as consumers) have a two-period life, investing in R&D during the first period and competing in the product market in the second period. The number of firms is endogenously determined and the set of successful firms by a Bernoullian...

We address the notion of dynamic, endogenous diversity and its role in theories of investment and technological innovation. We develop a formal model of an innovation arising from the combination of two existing modules with the objective to optimize the net benefits of diversity. The model...