Empirical studies of innovation have found that end users frequently develop important product and process innovations. Defying conventional wisdom on the negative effects of uncompensated spillovers, innovative users also often openly reveal their innovations to competing users and to...

In this paper the authors explore the incentives that usersmight have to freely reveal their proprietary innovations. They develop agame-theoretic model to explore the effect of these incentives on users´ decisions to reveal or hide their proprietary information.

The literature on new goods and social welfare generally assumes that manufacturers develop innovations. 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 product...