The debate surrounding escalating prescription drug prices has increasingly focused on the legitimacy of the practice of brand-name manufacturers receiving patent protection on peripheral features of the drug such as the route of administration, as opposed to just the active-ingredient itself....

Using application-level data from the Patent Office from 2001 to 2012, merged with personnel data on patent examiners, we explore the extent to which the key decision of examiners--whether to allow a patent--is shaped by the granting styles of her surrounding peers. Taking a number of...

Despite much theoretical attention to the concept of procrastination and much exploration of this phenomenon in laboratory settings, there remain few empirical investigations into the practice of procrastination in real world contexts, especially in the workplace. In this paper, we attempt to...

A quota system with an associated deadline may retain the possibility of worker procrastination and related deadline behaviors. A performance appraisal system based on continuous temporal incentives, on the other hand, has the potential to alleviate deadline effects but may lose some of the...