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Promoting intellectual discovery: patents versus markets
Science, 323 (5919): 1335--1339 (2009)
Аннотация
Abstract:Because they provide exclusive property rights, patents are generally considered to be an effective way to promote intellectual discovery. Here, we propose a different compensation scheme, in which everyone holds shares in the components of potential discoveries and can trade those shares in an anonymous market. In it, incentives to invent are indirect, through changes in share prices. In a series of experiments, we used the knapsack problem (in which participants have to determine the most valuable subset of objects that can fit in a knapsack of fixed volume) as a typical representation of intellectual discovery problems. We found that our “markets system” performed better than the patent system.Authors:Debrah Meloso, Bocconi University, 20136 Milan, Italy.Jernej Copic, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.Peter Bossaerts, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, CA 91125, USA, and Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
