We study a sequential Tullock contest with two stages and two identical prizes. The players compete for one prize in each stage and each player may win either one or two prizes. The players have either decreasing or increasing marginal values for the prizes, which are commonly known, and there...

This paper examines the sources of firm product and process innovation in Norway. It uses a purpose-built survey of 1604 firms in the five largest Norwegian city-regions to test, by means of a logit regression analysis, Jensen et al.’s (2007) contention that firm innovation is both the result...

A large portion of innovators do not patent their inventions. This is a relative puzzle since innovators are often perceived to be at the mercy of imitators in the absence of legal protection. In practice, innovators however invest actively in making their products technologically hard to...

Cumulative innovation is central to economic growth. Do patent rights facilitate or impede such follow-on innovation? This paper studies the effect of removing patent protection through court invalidation on the subsequent research related to the focal patent, as measured by later citations. We...

Guided by theories of management by exception, we study the impact of Information and Communication Technology on worker and plant manager autonomy and span of control. The theory suggests that information technology is a decentralizing force, whereas communication technology is a centralizing...

In our model multiple innovators compete against each other by submitting investment proposals to an investor. The investor chooses the least expensive proposal and when to invest in it. Innovators have to provide costly effort and they learn privately the cost of investing. Multiple efforts...

We study a sequential all-pay auction where heterogeneous contestants are privately informed about a parameter (ability) that affects their cost of effort. In the case of two contestants, contestant 1 (the first mover) makes an effort in the first period, while contestant 2 (the second mover)...

This paper studies the effect of top tax rates on inventors' mobility since 1977. We put special emphasis on "superstar" inventors, those with the most and most valuable patents. We use panel data on inventors from the United States and European Patent Offices to track inventors' locations over...

This paper studies the role of intrinsic motivation, reputation and reciprocity in driving open source software innovation. We exploit the observed pattern of contributions - the 'revealed preference' of developers - to infer the underlying incentives. Using detailed information on code...

We analyse the determinants of the decline in measured research productivity (the patent/R&D ratio) using panel data on manufacturing firms in the US for the period 1980-93. We focus on three factors: the level of demand, the quality of patents, and technological exhaustion. We first develop an...