Timo Goeschl (Department of Land Economy University of Cambridge) Timothy Swanson (Department of Economics and Faculty of Law, University College London)
Additional information is available for the following
registered author(s):
This paper considers those sectors of the economy that operate under the same regimes of rewarding private innovators as others, but differ in that they face recurring problems of resistance, as occur in the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries. This recurrence originates in the natural processes of selection and evolution among humanity’s biological competitors. The paper examines the capacity for decentralised patent-based incentive mechanisms to result in socially optimal outcomes in these sectors under scale- and speed-dependent evolution of pathogens. It demonstrates that there is a fundamental incompatibility between the dynamics of the patent system and the dynamics of the resistance problem under both types of evolution. Under scale-dependent evolution, the externalities within a patent-based system indicate that decentralised mechanisms will result in systematic underinvestment in R&D that decreases further with an increasing severity of the resistance problem. Under speed-dependent evolution, a patent-based system will fail to target socially optimal innovation size. The overall conclusion is that patent-based incentive mechanisms are incapable of sustaining society against a background of increasing resistance problems. The paper concludes with appropriate policy implications of these results.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei in its series Working Papers with number
2003.42.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)