Matthew F. Mitchell

Rewarding Sequential Innovators: Prizes, Patents and Buyouts

This paper presents a model of cumulative innovation where firms are heterogeneous in their research ability. We study the optimal reward policy when the quality of the ideas and their subsequent development effort are private information. The optimal assignment of property rights must counterbalance the incentives of current and future innovators. The resulting mechanism resembles a menu of patents that have infinite duration and fixed scope, where the latter increases in the value of the idea. Finally, we provide a way to implement this patent menu by using a simple buyout scheme: The innovator commits at the outset to a price ceiling at which he will sell his rights to a future inventor. By paying a larger fee initially, a higher price ceiling is obtained. Any subsequent innovator must pay this price and purchase its own buyout fee contract.

Innovation Variety and Patent Breadth

When innovations are heterogeneous, it may be advantageous to provide a variety of patents. By trading off patent breadth for length, it is possible that fees are not needed in the optimal policy. We present two examples. The first is a quality-ladder model, in which innovations benefit society directly as well as through their use as building blocks to future inventions, and the rate of arrival for the future innovation is unobserved. More fertile innovations get more breadth for a shorter time. Menus may also be useful in the case of horizontal product differentiation.

Network externalities and long-run market shares

We study a dynamic duopoly model with network externalities. The value of the product depends on the current and past network size. We compare the market outcome to a planner. With equal quality products, the market outcome may result in too little standardization (i.e. too many products active in the long run) but never too much. The potential inefficiency is non-monotonic in the strength of the network effect, being most likely for intermediate levels. When products differ in quality, an inferior product may dominate even when the planner would choose otherwise, but only if the discount factor is sufficiently large

The Scope and Organization of Production: Firm Dynamics Over the Learning Curve

I introduce a Bayesian-learning model of the firm to account for a variety of empirical facts about firms. The many tasks the firm can undertake (the scope of the firm) are informationally related, so that the firm can enjoy some economies of scope from information. The model predicts changes in firm size and its comovement with firm scope that are broadly consistent with the empirical evidence. It also provides an explanation for the limits to the scope of the firm: the firm may lack information, or it may be costly to communicate the information necessary to undertake many tasks.

Persistent Distortionary Policies with Asymmetric Information

Why are distortionary policies used when seemingly Pareto improvements exist? According to a standard textbook argument, a Pareto improvement can be obtained by eliminating the distortions, compensating the losers with a lump sum transfer, and redistributing the gains that are left over. We relax the assumption that winners know the losses suffered by the losers and show that the informationally efficient method of compensating losers may involve the use of seemingly inefficient (but informationally efficient) distortionary policies. The risk of overcompensating losers may make distortions informationally efficient, as there are points on the Pareto frontier where distortions are used.

Incentives and the Structure of Teams

may, on their own, generate monotone matching predictions in the absence of complementarities or anti-complementarities in production technology. We also derive sufficient conditions on the primitives of the model leading to the optimality of positive and negative matching of team members.

Unemployment insurance with hidden savings

This paper studies the design of unemployment insurance when neither the searching effort nor the savings of an unemployed agent can be monitored. If the principal could monitor the savings, the optimal policy would leave the agent savings-constrained. With a constant absolute risk-aversion (CARA) utility function, we obtain a closed form solution of the optimal contract. Under the optimal contract, the agent is neither saving nor borrowing constrained. Counter-intuitively, his consumption declines faster than implied by Hopenhayn and Nicolini (1997) [1]. The efficient allocation can be implemented by an increasing benefit during unemployment and a constant tax during employment.

A Theory of Market Pioneers, Dynamic Capabilities, and Industry Evolution

We analyze a model of industry evolution where the number of active submarkets is endogenously determined by pioneering innovation from incumbents and entrants. Incumbent pioneers enjoy an advantage of additional pioneering innovation via a dynamic capability that takes the form of an improved technology for innovation in young submarkets. Entrants are motivated in part by a desire to acquire the dynamic capability. We show that dynamic capabilities increase total innovation, but whether the capability confers an advantage in terms of marginal or average cost is important in determining how the impact of dynamic capabilities is distributed across incumbent and entrant innovation rates. We complement the existing literature-that focuses on exogenous arrival of submarkets or the steady state of a model with constant submarkets-by describing how competition, free entry, and the dynamic capability of incumbents drive the evolution of an industry. The shift from immature to mature submarkets can lead to a shakeout in firm numbers, and it eventually leads to a reduction in total dynamic capabilities in an industry. This paper was accepted by Bruno Cassiman, business strategy.

Market outcomes and dynamic patent buyouts

Patents are a useful but imperfect reward for innovation. In sectors like pharmaceuticals, where monopoly distortions seem particularly severe, there is growing international political pressure to identify new reward mechanisms which complement the patent system and reduce prices. Innovation prizes and other non-patent rewards are becoming more prevalent in government’s innovation policy, and are also widely implemented by private philanthropists. In this paper we describe situations in which a patent buyout is effective, using information from market outcomes as a guide to the payment amount. We allow for the fact that sales may be manipulable by the innovator in search of the buyout payment, and show that in a wide variety of cases the optimal policy still involves some form of patent buyout. The buyout uses two key pieces of information: market outcomes observed during the patent’s life, and the competitive outcome after the patent is bought out. We show that such dynamic market information can be effective at determining both marginal and total willingness to pay of consumers in many important cases, and therefore can generate the right innovation incentives.

Advances in Economics and Econometrics: Mechanisms for Allocation and Decentralization of Patent Rights

We trace the development of the literature on the allocation of patent rights from early models of patent length through modern models of cumulative innovation by many innovators. A common useful theme is describing policies in terms of patent duration. We use one framework for considering a variety of papers in the literature, and describe how duration promises can be used as a state variable in constructing optimal allocations in dynamic problems. We tie this long standing literature into a more recent literature using a mechanism design approach to study the reward of innovation under asymmetric information. Decentralization in models of sequential innovation generates a system that incorporates self-enforcement as a requirement of the optimal policy. One interpretation of the decentralization of rights between competing innovators is as a system of mandatory buyouts paid between innovators. ∗Prepared for the Econometric Society World Congress Volume †UCLA ‡CEMFI §Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.