Patents may assist trade in technology either by protecting buyers against the expropriation of the idea by third parties (the appropriation effect) or by enabling sellers to more frankly disclose the idea during the negotiation phase (the disclosure effect). We test for the presence of both...

We use data from 3000 academic scientists to estimate the effects of other parties' patents on the academics' research. Nearly half of all scientists report that their choice of research projects has been affected by the presence of other parties' patents. We find that transaction costs and the...

Conditional on the decision to enter the market for immature technology, we test for the effects that trust – as proxied by the context in which the negotiating parties met – has on the likelihood that these negotiations are successful. Using a randomised dataset of 860 university-firm and...