American innovation policy as expressed through intellectual property law contains a curious gap: it encourages individual research investments, but does little to facilitate cooperation among inventors, which is often a necessary precondition for innovation. This Article provides an in-depth...

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a shortlisted set. Items are differentiated by observable quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. The buyer's problem is to select a subset of maximal quality. Money does not enter the buyer's objective function,...

One way of thinking about research and development is to recognise that firms are trying to solve particular design problems. We often build these design problems into our models, but are forced to oversimplify them in order to make the models solvable. The approach taken in this paper is to...

We study optimal contracts when R\&D is outsourced to another company. We find that, when a realistic assumption holds, the optimal contract always leads in equilibrium to the lowest acceptable chance of having a successful technical innovation, given announced compensations. This assumption is...

We consider a budget-constrained mechanism designer who selects an optimal set of projects to maximize her utility. Projects may differ in their value for the designer, and their cost is private information. In this allocation problem, the quantity of procured projects is endogenously determined...