Timothy Simcoe

The Economics of Reproducibility in Preclinical Research

Low reproducibility rates within life science research undermine cumulative knowledge production and contribute to both delays and costs of therapeutic drug development. An analysis of past studies indicates that the cumulative (total) prevalence of irreproducible preclinical research exceeds 50%, resulting in approximately US

Patents and the Performance of Voluntary Standard Setting Organizations

28,000,000,000 (US

Is the Internet a US invention?-an economic and technological history of computer networking

28B)/year spent on preclinical research that is not reproducible—in the United States alone. We outline a framework for solutions and a plan for long-term improvements in reproducibility rates that will help to accelerate the discovery of life-saving therapies and cures.

Standard Setting Committees: Consensus Governance for Shared Technology Platforms

Voluntary standard-setting organizations (SSOs) are a common feature of systems industries, where firms supply interoperable components for a shared technology platform. These institutions promote coordinated innovation by providing a forum for collective decision making and a potential solution to the problem of fragmented and overlapping intellectual property rights. This paper examines the economic and technological significance of SSOs by analyzing the flow of citations to a sample of U.S. patents disclosed during the standard-setting process. Our main results show that the age distribution of SSO patent citations is shifted toward later years (relative to an average patent) and that citations increase substantially following standardization. These results suggest that SSOs identify promising technologies and influence their subsequent adoption.

Competing on Standards? Entrepreneurship, Intellectual Property, and Platform Technologies

Abstract Although the inventions embodied in the Internet originated in a diverse set of industrial economies, the US was consistently the source of critical innovations and an early adopter of new applications. Why did other nations, including several that made important inventive contributions to the Internet, not play a larger role in its development, particularly in the creation of new business organizations, governance institutions, and applications? We argue that the role of the US “national innovation system” in the creation of the Internet echoes several key themes of US technological development before 1940. The presence of a large domestic market, a set of antitrust and regulatory policies that weakened the power of incumbent telecommunications firms, and a diverse private/public research community that was willing to work with both domestic and foreign inventions were important preconditions for US leadership in computer networking innovation.

Status, Quality, and Attention: What's in a (Missing) Name?

Voluntary Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs) use a consensus process to create new compatibility standards. Practitioners have suggested that SSOs are increasingly politicized and perhaps incapable of producing timely standards. This article develops a simple model of standard setting committees and tests its predictions using data from the Internet Engineering Task Force, an SSO that produces many of the standards used to run the Internet. The results show that an observed slowdown in standards production between 1993 and 2003 can be linked to distributional conflicts created by the rapid commercialization of the Internet. (JEL C78, L15, L86)

e-Business and Disintegration of the Semiconductor Industry Value Chain

Entrepreneurs often rely on intellectual property (IP) to earn a return on their innovations, and also compatibility standards, which allow them to supply specialized components for a shared technology platform. This paper compares the IP strategies of small entrepreneurs and large incumbents that disclose patents at 13 voluntary standard setting organizations (SSOs). These patents have a relatively high litigation rate. For small private firms, the probability of filing a lawsuit increases after disclosure to the SSO. For large public firms, the filing rate is unchanged. Although forward citations increase after disclosure for all firms, the size of this effect is the same for entrepreneurs and incumbents. These results suggest that standards increase the difference between large and small firms’ incentives to litigate, rather than the relative value of their patents. We conclude that because specialized technology providers cannot seek rents in complementary markets, they defend IP more aggressively once it has been incorporated into an open platform.

Diversification, Diseconomies of Scope, and Vertical Contracting: Evidence from the Taxicab Industry

How much are we influenced by an authors identity when evaluating his or her work? This paper exploits a natural experiment to measure the impact of status signals in the context of open standards development. For a period of time, e-mails announcing new submissions to the Internet Engineering Task Force would replace individual author names with “et al.” if submission volumes were unusually high. We measure the impact of status signals by comparing the effect of obscuring high-versus low-status author names. Our results show that name-based signals can explain up to three-quarters of the difference in publication rates between high-and low-status authors. The signaling effect disappears for a set of prescreened proposals that receive more scrutiny than a typical submission, suggesting that status signals are more important when attention is scarce (or search costs high). We also show that submissions from high-status authors receive more attention on electronic discussion boards, which may help high-status authors to develop their ideas and bring them forward to publication. This paper was accepted by Jesper Sorensen, organizations.

Explaining the Increase in Intellectual Property Disclosure

This paper examines the influence of Internet-based e-Business applications on the vertical separation of design, manufacture, equipment production and process development in the global semiconductor industry. Vertical specialization has contributed to the rapid growth of semiconductor manufacturing capacity in Southeast Asia and the creation of new forms of international production networks linking design and manufacturing specialists. Although these trends began before the development of Internet-related e-Business applications, the Internet is facilitating these trends and their effects on the geographic distribution of manufacturing capacity. At the same time, however, many of the opportunities created by e-Business applications for vertically specialized firms should prove equally advantageous to integrated device manufacturers. Obstacles to e-Business applications in the global semiconductor industry include standardsrelated issues, data-security concerns, and the needs for far-reaching internal reorganization of business processes, especially by smaller firms. All of these obstacles suggest that the adoption of e-Business and the realization of its productivity benefits or cost efficiencies are likely to occur slowly.

Government green procurement spillovers: Evidence from municipal building policies in California ☆

This paper studies how firms reorganize following diversification, proposing that firms use outsourcing, or vertical disintegration, to manage diseconomies of scope. We also consider the origins of scope diseconomies, showing how different underlying mechanisms generate contrasting predictions about the link between within-firm task heterogeneity and the incentive to outsource following diversification. We test these propositions using microdata on taxicab and limousine fleets from the Economic Census. The results show that taxicab firms outsource, by shifting the composition of their fleets toward owner-operator drivers, when they diversify into the limousine business. The magnitude of the shift toward driver ownership is larger in less urban markets, where the tasks performed by taxicab and limousine drivers are more similar. These findings suggest that (1) firms use outsourcing to manage diseconomies of scope at a particular point in the value chain and (2) interagent conflicts can be an important source of scope diseconomies.