In most modern economies scientific and technological research activities are conducted in two distinct organizational modes: commercially oriented R&D based upon proprietary information, and noncommercial “open science.” When taken together and kept in proper balance, these form a...

This essay examines the economics of patronage in the production of knowledge and its influence upon the historical formation of key elements in the ethos and organizational structure of publicly funded open science. The emergence during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries of the...

We show how standard consumer and producer theory can be used to estimate welfare in insurance markets with selection. The key observation is that the same price variation needed to identify the demand curve also identifies how costs vary as market participants endogenously respond to price....