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...

Patents are often portrayed as the necessary reward to compensate pharmaceutical firms for the huge costs and risks associated with Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-mandated clinical trials of new drugs. But the relationship between the patent system and other regulation of drugs is more...

In recent years data-sharing has been a recurring focus of struggle within the scientific research community as improvements in information technology and digital networks have expanded the ways that data can be produced, disseminated, and used. Information technology makes it easier to share...

The patent system typically takes credit for motivating biopharmaceutical innovation by making it profitable, while drug regulation gets blamed for burdening innovation with bureaucratic costs and delays. But FDA regulation in fact promotes profitability by prolonging exclusivity in product...

Richard Nelson's The Simple Economics of Basic Scientific Research (1959) and Kenneth Arrow's Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Invention (1962) presented the basic analytical tools still used to understand the patent system. Two subsequent changes--one primarily legal and the...