The incentive thesis supplies the primary rationale for the patent system: without an exclusionary right, firms will decline to invest in innovations that are subject to expropriation. Empirical inquiry into the incentive thesis’ scope of application has yielded complex results, which are...

The moral prohibition against theft, and legal causes of action against trespass and like activities, are usually stated in absolutist terms that admit few exceptions. But application of the theft prohibition to creative goods is incomplete and unstable across industries, regions and periods....

The incentive thesis for patents is challenged by the existence of alternative means by which firms can capture returns on innovation. Taking into account patent alternatives yields a robust reformulation of the incentive thesis as mediated by organizational form. Patents enable innovators to...

We typically assume that intellectual property makes a substantial difference in regulating access to intellectual goods and thereby provides incentives for the production of intellectual goods. But the existence of alternative instruments by which to appropriate innovation returns suggests that...

It is commonly asserted that innovation markets suffer from excessive intellectual property protections, which in turn stifle output. But empirical inquiries can neither confirm nor deny this assertion. Under the "agnostic" assumption that we cannot assess directly whether intellectual-property...

The fashion market is an anomaly: innovation is vigorous but original producers are substantially unprotected against imitation, which proliferates under an incomplete property regime consisting of strong trademark protections and weak design protections. We account for this anomaly through a...

In recent years the Supreme Court, Congress and the White House have taken actions designed to weaken patent rights. These actions track widely expressed views among legal and some economics scholars that cast doubt on the social value of robust intellectual property rights. These views rely on...

Scholarly and popular commentary often assert that markets characterized by intensive patent issuance and enforcement suffer from “patent thickets” that suppress innovation. This assertion is difficult to reconcile with continuous robust levels of R&D investment, coupled with declining...

It is now widely asserted that legal regimes that enforce contractual and other limitations on labor mobility deter technological innovation. First, recent empirical studies purport to show relationships between bans on enforcing noncompete agreements, increased employee movement, and increased...

Conventional academic, policy, and judicial discussions of patent protection assume that patents solve a classic public goods or market underinvestment problem. This assumption states that, without patents, potential innovators would expect to have no or highly limited means of preventing...