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...

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...

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...