This paper considers three firms that engage in an R&D contest to develop a new profitable technology. For a broad range of parameters, the firm that leads the contest (i.e., has the highest probability of success) is better-off licensing or selling its superior interim knowledge to one of the...

We examine the implications of pre-grant publication (PP) of patent applications in the context of a cumulative innovation model. We show that pre-grant publication of patents lead to fewer applications and fewer inventions, but it raises the probability that new technologies will reach the...

We develop a theory of organization design in which the firm's structure is chosen to mitigate moral hazard problems in the selection and the implementation of projects. For a given set of projects, the divisional structureʺ which gives each agent the full responsibility over a subset of...

This paper examines the incentive of unpaid programmers to contribute to open source software (OSS) projects in order to signal their talents. The analysis shows that if programmers contribute to OSS projects at all, then generically there are multiple equilibria. In these equilibria, an...

The assumption that decision makers choose actions to maximize their preferences is a central tenet in economics. This assumption is often justied either formally or informally by appealing to evolutionary arguments. In contrast, we show that in almost every game and for almost every family of...

This paper develops a general methodology for characterizing the dynamic evolution of preferences in a wide class of strategic interactions. We give simple conditions characterizing the limiting distribution of preferences in general games, and apply our results to study the evolutionary...