Intellectual property governance and knowledge creation in UK universities

The public discourse advocating increased patenting of academic discoveries, which has led to the approval of legislative measures (such as the Bayh–Dole Act, which is now adopted world-wide in various forms) is based on a set of theoretical arguments, mainly related to knowledge transfer and financial reward. Using an original survey of 46 universities (about 27%) in the UK, we investigate whether some of these arguments are supported by evidence. We focus on the extent to which patents, as opposed to other forms of intellectual property (IP) protection mechanisms, enhance knowledge circulation, and especially contribute to universities’ own knowledge creation processes. We also investigate whether universities consider the markets for ideas and creative expressions to function efficiently. We find that universities use all forms of IP intensively in order to transfer their knowledge to the industry or the government. However, they mainly rely on non-proprietary IP (open-source and no-patent strategies) when aiming to enhance their own knowledge-creation processes. Also, universities do not find that markets for patents or copyrights function more smoothly than non-proprietary IP marketplaces. The results challenge the orthodox theories on the rationales for patents and other proprietary IP rights. Thus, we question the assumptions and arguments underpinning the implementation of patents on academic research outcomes via political reforms since the 1980s.     

知识产权保护的帕雷托改进——组建国家知识产权经营管理公司的设想

对知识产权盗用行为的博弈分析和预期成本收益分析证明,在保护知识产权上,降低知识产权使用费和加速知识产权贬值同加大监督惩罚等手段一样重要。而传统知识和国有知识产权都存在产权不明晰的问题,导致保护不力。组建国家知识产权经营管理公司是知识产权保护的帕雷托改进方案。     

Vertical technology transfer and the welfare implications of patent protection

Significant amount of vertical technology transfer occurs between developed and developing-country firms, and many trading companies from developing countries create competition in the developed countries, yet the literature on intellectual property rights did not pay considerable attention to these aspects. In a Cournot oligopoly with vertical technology transfer, we show that patent protection in the developing country raises developed-country welfare if the following three conditions hold together: (i) patent protection in the developing country deters entry in the final goods market, (ii) the marginal cost difference between the incumbent and the entrant final goods sellers is sufficiently small, and (iii) the marginal cost difference between the incumbent and the entrant developing-country producers is sufficiently high. We also show that patent protection in the developing country always creates higher developing-country welfare if no developing-country firm enters the final goods market. We also discuss the implications of Bertrand competition on our results.     

Leadership in Public Good Provision: A Timing Game Perspective

We address in this paper the issue of leadership when two governments provide public goods to their constituencies with cross‐border externalities as both public goods are valued by consumers in both countries. We study a timing game between two different countries: before providing public goods, the two policymakers non‐cooperatively decide their preferred sequence of moves. We establish conditions under which a first‐ or second‐mover advantage emerges for each country, highlighting the role of spillovers and the complementarity or substitutability of public goods. As a result, we are able to prove that there is no leader when, for both countries, public goods are substitutable. When public goods are complements for both countries, each of them may emerge as the leader in the game. Hence a coordination issue arises. We use the notion of risk‐dominance to select the leading government. Finally, in the mixed case, the government for whom public goods are substitutable becomes the leader.     

MARKET SIZE AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PROTECTION*

Intellectual property (IP) protection involves a trade‐off between the undesirability of monopoly and the desirable encouragement of creation and innovation. Optimal policy depends on the relative strength of these two forces. We give a quantitative assessment of current IP policies. We focus particularly on the scale of the market, showing that as it increases, due either to growth or to the expansion of trade, IP protection should be reduced.     

Effect of an audience in public goods provision

This paper investigates a novel public goods game where contributions to the public goods require effort that is observable. When the players are observed, they exert more effort to contribute to the public goods, and free-riding diminishes significantly compared to the no observer case. These effects are absent when no effort is required in order to contribute to the public goods. Furthermore, in the presence of an audience, the contributions to the public goods do not diminish when the game is repeated in the effort-required environment. Being observed does not affect the performance of the players if there is no strategic aspect of the game, in other words, when they play a private goods game. These results indicate that an individual wants to avoid appearing lazy when her effort helps the society.     

Legal Institutions, Sectoral Heterogeneity, and Economic Development

Poor countries have lower PPP-adjusted investment rates and face higher relative prices of investment goods. It has been suggested that this happens either because these countries have a relatively lower TFP in industries producing capital goods or because they are subject to greater investment distortions. This paper provides a micro-foundation for the cross-country dispersion in investment distortions. We first document that firms producing capital goods face a higher level of idiosyncratic risk than their counterparts producing consumption goods. In a model of capital accumulation where the protection of investors' rights is incomplete, this difference in risk induces a wedge between the returns on investment in the two sectors. The wedge is bigger, the poorer the investor protection. In turn, this implies that countries endowed with weaker institutions face higher relative prices of investment goods, invest a lower fraction of their income, and end up being poorer. We find that our mechanism may be quantitatively important.     

A Model of a Predatory State

We provide a model of a primitive state whose rulers extorttaxes for their own ends. This "predatory" state can resultin lower levels of both output and popular welfare than eitherorganized banditry or anarchy. The predatory state may providepublic goods, such as protection, and hence may superficiallyresemble a contractual state. But the ability to provide suchgoods can actually reduce popular welfare after allowing fortax changes. Moreover, the kinds of public goods that predatorystates provide are those that increase revenue, not necessarilywelfare. We consider when primitive states are likely to emergefrom organized banditry, and argue that poverty may result instatelessness rather than vice versa. We show that even a weakstate (in transition from banditry) can be bad for output andwelfare, and that a "corrupt" state that makes side deals withbandits is especially bad.     

On the Social Desirability of Patents for Sequential Innovations in a Vertically Differentiated Market

We consider a market for vertically differentiated goods where firms enter over time, after having developed innovations characterised by different quality levels. We show that patent height and length interact to determine the ultimate emergence of duopoly. In general, imposing quality improvements on later entrants entails the persistence of monopoly, while a duopoly equilibrium emerges when the second innovator is allowed to produce a sufficiently inferior quality and the patent protection granted to the first innovator is not too long-lasting.     

Some Implications Of Endogenous Technological Change For Technology Policies In Developing Countries

Part I contrasts the general types of policy advice that follow from three different approaches to understanding economic growth and technological change. Neoclassical theory gives policy advice that is assumed to be relevant for all countries at all times: remove sources of ‘market failures’. Romer's branch of new macro growth theory stresses the nature of knowledge, non-rivalrous and partly appropriable. Structuralist-evolutionary theory is micro based and stresses the uncertainty that is associated with technological advance. Both of the latter approaches conclude that the neoclassical optimal allocation of resources is unachievable and hence the policy advice of removing impediments to achieving that optimum is not well grounded. As a result, policy advice for enhancing technological change must rely on a mixture of theory, empirical analysis and policy judgement. Part II deals with the large amount of context-specific policy advice that follows from structuralist-evolutionary theories.     

创意产品出口、模仿威胁与知识产权保护

本文从理论上分析了知识产权保护对创意产品出口的影响,并以此建立计量模型,利用美国2006-2010年的创意产品出口的面板数据进行实证分析。结果表明,进口国的知识产权保护增强有利于创意产品出口,而且在考虑模仿威胁的情况下,这种正效应依然显著。知识产权保护在创意产品贸易中的正效应大于在货物贸易中的正效应。创意产品对知识产权保护更敏感。     

Identical Preferences Lower Bound for Allocation of Heterogenous Tasks and NIMBY Problems

We study the allocation of collectively owned indivisible goods when monetary transfers are possible. We restrict our attention to incentive‐compatible mechanisms which allocate the goods efficiently. Among these mechanisms, we characterize those that respect the identical preferences lower bound: each agent should be at least as well off as in a hypothetical economy where all agents have the same preference as hers, no agent envies another, and the budget is balanced.     

INSTITUTIONAL STRUCTURE IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PROTECTION: LEGISLATED V. ADMINISTERED PROTECTION

In endogenous tariff theory the outcome of the political process (the tariff) is a strictly private good from the perspective of the specific-factors in an industry. That is, the benefits from participation in the political process are fully captured by the participant group. We argue that this is an institutional assumption by showing that an alternative, administered protection, involves the enforcement of a rule that, once written, is applied to all industry groups, where applicable. Attempts to increase protection therefore result in benefits to all import competing industry groups. In a short-run neo-classical model of trade with no intermediate goods, you therefore get a political free rider problem that you do not get with legislated tariffs. Further, it is argued that the distinction between these forms of protection is of both empirical and philosophical relevance.     

PRICE AND QUANTITY COMPETITION IN A UNIONISED MIXED DUOPOLY: THE CASES OF SUBSTITUTES AND COMPLEMENTS*

We investigate a differentiated mixed duopoly in which private and public firms can choose to strategically set prices or quantities when unions are present. For the case of a unionised mixed duopoly, there exists a dominant strategy only for the public firm that chooses Bertrand competition irrespective of whether the goods are substitutes or complements; there is no dominant strategy for a private firm. Thus, we show that regardless of the nature of goods, social welfare under Bertrand competition is always determined in equilibrium, wherein Bertrand competition entails higher social welfare than Cournot competition. Moreover, our main results hold irrespective of the nature of goods, with the exception that when a sufficiently large parameter of complements is employed, the ranking of a private firm's profit is not reversed, which is in contrast to the standard findings.     

ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS OF REFILL PACKS

It is common sense that refill packs can increase the repeated use of durable goods, reduce resource waste and be conducive to environmental protection. However, their existence also has an economic effect. For instance, we find that the profit of a monopolistic firm will increase as a result of selling the refill packs when the depreciation rate of the durable good is low. In an extension of the model, we point out that there is an entrant that competes with the incumbent in relation to the composite goods and the refill packs. In order to compete in terms of the prices of the composite goods, the incumbent sells the refill packs not only to increase profit, but also to reduce the amount of waste resulting from the durable goods. As for competing in regard to the prices of the refill packs, if the cost of the composite goods is small, then the incumbent's profit from selling the composite goods will increase. By comparing two extensions of the model, we find that the environmental effect of the price competition in regard to the refill packs is greater than the environmental effect of the price competition in relation to the composite goods.     

Competing engines of growth: Innovation and standardization

We study a dynamic general equilibrium model where innovation takes the form of the introduction of new goods whose production requires skilled workers. Innovation is followed by a costly process of standardization, whereby these new goods are adapted to be produced using unskilled labor. Our framework highlights a number of novel results. First, standardization is both an engine of growth and a potential barrier to it. As a result, growth is an inverse U-shaped function of the standardization rate (and of competition). Second, we characterize the growth and welfare maximizing speed of standardization. We show how optimal protection of intellectual property rights affecting the cost of standardization vary with the skill-endowment, the elasticity of substitution between goods and other parameters. Third, we show that, depending on how competition between innovating and standardizing firms is modelled and on parameter values, a new type of multiplicity of equilibria may arise. Finally, we study the implications of our model for the skill premium and we illustrate novel reasons for linking North–South trade to intellectual property rights protection.     

An IMPOSSIBILITY THEOREM IN PURE PUBLIC GOODS ECONOMIES WITH FEASIBILITY CONSTRAINTS: VOTING BY COMMITTEES IN NON-RECTANGULAR FEASIBLE SETS*

We consider the problem of choosing an alternative in a pure public goods economy with feasibility constraints when voters have "additively-separable and single-peaked"preferences.Our purpose is to identify tops-only voting procedures satisfying "nonmanipulability" and "voter sovereignty". First, we show that such procedures are generalizations of the schemes of "voting by committees"¹)introduced by Barbera, Sonnenschein and Zhou (1991) in the sense that these procedures are defined similarly for the generalized feasible set. Second, we establish that when no two goods can be simultaneously produced at their maximal feasible levels, the procedures are characterized by the existence of a very powerful voter.     

Tied Aid and Welfare

In this paper we present a model of tied aid to shed light on the dispute between Kemp and Kojima (1985 ) and Schweinberger (1990 ) and to complement their analyses. We show that if the households of the recipient country are not informed of the transfers at their consumption decision, they have an incentive to trade the purchased goods from their domestic production income whenever transfer paradoxes occur. We also demonstrate that when they are aware of the transfers and can trade the purchased goods from their production income, there are no transfer paradoxes under the normality condition of commodities.     

Environmental Performance in Socially Fragmented Countries

Social fragmentation is often associated with reduced co-operative behaviour, which undermines public goods provision (such as environmental protection). The few studies linking social fragmentation and environmental performance have been confined to using ethnic fractionalisation as the only measure of social heterogeneity. In this paper, we contribute to the literature in a twofold manner. First, we bring into the analysis alternative measures of social fragmentation (i.e. religious fractionalisation, ethnic/religious polarisation), that have received considerable attention in development economics in recent years. Second, this is the first study to our knowledge that makes use of a large panel dataset of several environmental indicators to explore links between ethnic/religious diversity and the environment. We find that all indices of social fragmentation are negatively linked to measures of environmental quality, although for some of them the size of the effect is larger in the case of polarisation.     

Trade Policy in the Presence of Economies of Scale and Product Variety*

It is well known that laissez faire may not be the ‘first-best’ policy in a closed economy where economies of scale are present. Corden has shown that this conclusion can carry over into an open economy, though under his assumption that imported goods are perfect substitutes for home-produced goods, interference with international trade could not raise real income. We have shown that where there are economies of scale, and imported goods are not identical to the home produced goods, interference with trade could raise real national income, though such a form of intervention would not normally be optimal. Further, it could even be desirable to support home production of more than one ‘variety’. Measurements of ‘costs of protection’ that aggregate several varieties into one may mislead not only regarding the size of the cost but even regarding its sign.