IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/aal/abbswp/06-29.html

Cumulative Innovation, Sampling and the Hold-Up Problem

Author

Listed:
  • Rufus Pollock

Abstract

With cumulative innovation and imperfect information about the value of innovations, intellectual property rights can result in hold-up and therefore it may be better not to have them. Extending the basic cumulative innovation model to include 'sampling' by second-stage firms, we find that the lower the cost of sampling, or the larger the differential between high and low value second-stage innovations, the more likely it is that a regime without intellectual property rights will be preferable. Thus, technological change which reduces the cost of encountering and trialling new 'ideas' implies a reduction in the socially optimal level of rights such as patents and copyright.

Suggested Citation

  • Rufus Pollock, 2006. "Cumulative Innovation, Sampling and the Hold-Up Problem," DRUID Working Papers 06-29, DRUID, Copenhagen Business School, Department of Industrial Economics and Strategy/Aalborg University, Department of Business Studies.
    • Handle: RePEc:aal:abbswp:06-29
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://wp.druid.dk/wp/20060029.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. MARTENS Bertin & DUCH BROWN Nestor, 2020. "The economics of Business-to-Government data sharing," JRC Working Papers on Digital Economy 2020-04, Joint Research Centre.
    2. Pollock, Rufus, 2006. "Innovation and Imitation with and without Intellectual Property Rights," MPRA Paper 5025, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 17 Jul 2007.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • K3 - Law and Economics - - Other Substantive Areas of Law
    • L5 - Industrial Organization - - Regulation and Industrial Policy
    • O3 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aal:abbswp:06-29. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Keld Laursen (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.druid.dk/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.