The U.S. has been under pressure to abandon the unique first-to-invent feature of its patent law for awarding patents. The opposition to reform however argues that switch to a first-to-file rule, the international norm, will undermine innovation. We evaluate this argument in a dynamic stochastic...

Cripps et al. (2005) conjectured that in an infinitely repeated game with two equally patient players, if there is positive probability that the players could be Stackelberg types, then equilibrium behavior would resemble a war of attrition, i.e., a two-sided reputation result would hold. In...

How do price commitments impact the amount of information firms acquire about potential customers? We examine this question in the context of a competitive market. Contracts are incomplete because the amount of information firms acquire about applicants during the screening process cannot be...

This paper presents an analytically tractable dynamic game in which players jointly use a resource. The resource replenishes fully but collapses should total use exceed a threshold in any one period. The initial level of use is known to be safe. If it is at all optimal to increase resource use,...

The economics literature clearly shows that the transmission of knowledge diminishes with physical distance, a factor contributing to industrial clustering. This paper investigates how those distances have stretched over time. We measure the physical distance between collaborating inventors, as...