Uma alternativa de patentes

Inducement Prizes and Innovation,” L. Brunt, J. Lerner and T. Nicholas (2011)

September 27th, 2011 § Leave a Comment

Patents have many problems, deadweight loss from temporary monopoly being only one of them. There are also patent thickets where so many patents bind on any downstream investment, particularly in high tech, that patenting is only a defensive move – apparently these were less politically correctly called “Mexican standoffs” in the literature in the 1970s. There is the problem of inducing invention toward favored fields since patents treat everyone equally, and Moser’s lovely 2005 AER shows that in the era when patents were limited to fewer industries, they definitely affected the direction of innovation. These problems have led to proposals for prize systems to partially replace patents, such as the proposals of Michael Kremer, or the X Prize contests. But is there any evidence that prizes work?
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