A large portion of innovators do not patent their inventions. This is a relative puzzle since innovators are often perceived to be at the mercy of imitators in the absence of legal protection. In practice, innovators however invest actively in making their products technologically hard to...

Markets for technology can promote innovation by allowing for division of labor in research and development. Some firms may specialize in the discovery of ideas, while others have a comparative advantage in later stages of development and marketing. However, these gains depend on the timing of...

We study the problem of an inventor who brings to the market an innovation that can be legally copied. Imitators may `enter' the market by copying the innovation at a cost or by buying from the inventor the knowledge necessary to reproduce and use the invention. The possibility of contracting...

We study the problem of an inventor who brings to the market an innovation that can be legally copied. Imitators may 'enter' the market by copying the innovation at a cost or by buying from the inventor the knowledge necessary to reproduce and use the invention. The possibility of contracting...

We examine the appropriability problem of an inventor who brings to the market a successful innovation that can be legally copied. We study this problem in a dynamic model in which imitators can “enter” the market either by copying the invention at a cost or by buying knowledge (a license)...

Because of its potential to improve the environment and enhance national security, reducing automobile-related gasoline consumption has become a major U.S. public policy issue. Recently, many analysts have called for new or more stringent policies to discourage gasoline consumption. Proposals...

Exclusive patents sacrifice product competition to provide firms incentives to innovate. We characterize an alternative mechanism whereby later inventors are allowed to share the patent if they discover within a certain time period of the first inventor. These runner-up patents increase social...

In situations where a biased sender provides verifiable information to a receiver, I study how strategic reporting affects the incentives to search for information. Research provides series of signals that can be used selectively in reporting. I show that the sender is strictly worse off when...

This article examines the gasoline tax option being proposed in the U.S. in 2005, employing an econometrically based multi-market simulation model to explore the policy's efficiency and distributional implications. Because of its potential to improve the environment and enhance national...

Though a large literature on the determinants of turnout has ourished, there is scant evidence on the causal impact of turnout on policies implemented in practice. Using data on French municipalities and instrumental variables for turnout based on temperature and inuenza variations, we show that...