Intellectual property rights are monopoly rights, which have undesirable welfare properties. Therefore, several studies suggest using rewards as incentives for innovation instead. However, these studies have thus far had little effect on actual policy, possibly because such rewards may be...

This paper builds a new model of financial exchange competition, tailored to the institutional details of the modern US stock market. In equilibrium, exchange trading fees are competitive but exchanges are able to earn economic profits from the sale of speed technology. We document stylized...

Based on international advice, most countries have now adopted competition laws. The more competition, the better – especially for the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that most need to compete. Yet, “better” competition laws (as measured by a range of characteristics commonly...

This paper examines security design in imperfectly competitive markets in which assets clear separately rather than jointly. Derivatives are generally nonredundant even with zero asset supply. We characterize the scope for introducing nonredundant derivatives and examine the welfare effects of...

Advances in market-clearing technology for multiple assets and synthetic products present alternative ways to leverage complementarities and substitutabilites in asset payoffs. This paper compares their equilibrium and welfare effects. Our results underscore the difference the price impact makes...

This paper identifies the processes to be considered in evaluating innovation and innovation outcomes. It also examines the existing economics literature on dynamic competition and summarizes other issues through an analysis of case studies in which corporate innovation competition was proven to...

Operation Warp Speed (OWS) was a U.S. government-led program to accelerate the development, production, and administration of COVID-19 vaccines. The program cut the typical ten-year timeline needed to develop a new vaccine down to ten months and began vaccinating vulnerable populations within a...

“Software platforms are the invisible engines that have created, touched, or transformed nearly every major industry for the past quarter century. They power everything from mobile phones and automobile navigation systems to search engines and web portals. They have been the source of enormous...

Software is a potentially excludable public good. It is possible, at some cost, to exclude non-paying users from its consumption by using copyright law or technological restraints. Licensing the software under proprietary license terms makes of it a private good, licensing it under the BSD does...

We introduce the proto-entrepreneur as an economic agent who must first — i.e., before acting entrepreneurially — coordinate non-price information with others in order to reveal exploitable opportunities. Entrepreneurship, therefore, involves dual economic discovery problems, each of which...