Published March 6, 2009
| Supplemental Material
Journal Article
Open
Promoting Intellectual Discovery: Patents Versus Markets
- Creators
- Meloso, Debrah
- Copic, Jernej
- Bossaerts, Peter
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.
Additional Information
© 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Received for publication 3 April 2008. Accepted for publication 5 January 2009. This study was partly funded by the U.S. NSF (grants SES-0616431 and SES-0317715) and the Swiss Finance Institute.Attached Files
Supplemental Material - Meloso1.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 15692
- DOI
- 10.1126/science.1158624
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20090909-113900592
- SES-0616431
- NSF
- SES-0317715
- NSF
- Swiss Finance Institute
- Created
-
2009-09-22Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-08Created from EPrint's last_modified field