The "tragedy of the commons" metaphor helps explain why people overuse shared resources. However, the recent proliferation of intellectual property rights in biomedical research suggests a different tragedy, an "anticommons" in which people underuse scarce resources because too many owners can...

This paper investigates how patent applications and grants held by new ventures improve their abilityto attract venture capital (VC) financing. We argue that investors are faced with considerable uncertaintyand therefore rely on patents as signals when trying to assess the prospects of potential...

Using detailed data on biotechnology in Japan, we find that identifiable collaborations" between particular university star scientists and firms have a large positive impact on firms'" research productivity, increasing the average firm's biotech patents by 34 percent development by 27 percent,...