Intellectual Property: When Is It the Best Incentive System?

By N. Gallini, Suzanne Scotchmer. Innovation Policy and the Economy, 2002

422 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Intellectual property is not the only mechanism used in the American economy for rewarding R&D. Prizes and contract research of various types are also common. Given the current controversies that swirl around intellectual property policies, we review the economic reasoning that supports patent and other intellectual property over the alternatives. For those economic environments where intellectual property is justified, we review some of the arguments for why it is designed as it is. We focus particularly on the issue of how broad awards should be and how much protection should go to the original inventor (as opposed to those who subsequently improve the invention). We emphasize that the ideal design of an intellectual property system depends on the ease with which rightsholders can enter into licensing and other contractual arrangements involving these rights.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/374f583f2ba71b5b3febaa8578c7e4599178cf8c

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In Economics and Econometrics

In Management of Technology and Innovation

Citations in the corpus

Modeling a Paradigm Shift: From Producer Innovation to User and Open Collaborative Innovation (2010, background): “…will disappear if anyone can simply copy producers’ innovations, and therefore producers must be granted subsidies or intellectual property rights that give them exclusive control over their innovations for some period of time (Machlup and Penrose 1951, Teece 1986, Gallini and Scotchmer 2002).”
Intellectual Property Rights Policy, Competition And Innovation (2011, background): “…1962, Reinganum, 1981, Tirole, 1988, Romer, 1990, Grossman and Helpman, 1991, Aghion and Howitt, 1992, Green and Scotchmer, 1995, Scotchmer, 1999, Gallini and Scotchmer, 2002, O’Donoghue and Zweimuller, 2004).7 Much of the literature discusses the trade-off between these two forces to determine…”
Patent Systems for Encouraging Innovation: Lessons from Economic Analysis (2006, neutral): “2 See e.g. Kortum and Lerner (1999), Jaffe (2000), Coriat and Orsi (2002), Gallini (2002), Martinez and Guellec (2004).”
On sharks, trolls, and their patent prey—Unrealistic damage awards and firms’ strategies of “being infringed” (2007, background): “44 See, e.g., Blair and Cotter (2001, 45 and 46), Gallini and Scotchmer 2002) and Henkel and von Hippel (2003).”
Does Intellectual Monopoly Stimulate or Stifle Innovation (2012, background): “Substituting (23) and (24) into v1 − φq = vn − φn from (15) and (19) yields”
Exploring the impact of open innovation on national systems of innovation — A theoretical analysis (2012, neutral): “Therefore, enabling OI practices means improving and strengthening the IPR protection system and related legal regime [48] within the NSI framework.”
Sequential Innovation, Patents, And Imitation (2009, neutral): “35 In a review of the literature, Gallini and Scotchmer (2001) conclude, “Thus, with some caution, we can extract from the literature a case for broad (and short) patents.”