Based on an inductive study of the windsurfing, snowboarding and skateboarding industries, Sonali Shah shows how user-generated innovations and the social interactions among users can lead to the formation of firms and markets.
Oren Bar-Gill and Gideon Parchomovsky point out a mechanism that may help some anti-commons problems. When innovation is cumulative, some researchers may prefer to publish rather than patent some of their findings. This is because follow-on inventors will then have greater incentives to improve the technology, possibly enhancing the profits on the original invention. Bar-Gill and Parchomovsky suggest policy changes to encourage publication.
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Nancy Gallini and Suzanne Scotchmer review the literature that compares patents to other mechanisms for promoting innovation, including prizes and government contracts.
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Enforcement is not a problem when society provides incentives to innovators by means of rewards rather than patents or other intellectual property rights. There is, in fact, a long history of inventions developed to win rewards. Steven Shavell and Tanguy van Ypersele weigh some of the theoretical benefits of reward systems against the benefits of patent systems.
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