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The Mythology Of Game Theory, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner, Nick Weller
The Mythology Of Game Theory, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner, Nick Weller
Faculty Scholarship
Non-cooperative game theory is at its heart a theory of cognition, specifically a theory of how decisions are made. Game theory's leverage is that we can design different payoffs, settings, player arrays, action possibilities, and information structures, and that these differences lead to different strategies, outcomes, and equilibria. It is well-known that, in experimental settings, people do not adopt the predicted strategies, outcomes, and equilibria. The standard response to this mismatch of prediction and observation is to add various psychological axioms to the game-theoretic framework. Regardless of the differing specific proposals and results, game theory uniformly makes certain cognitive assumptions …
The Private And Social Costs Of Patent Trolls, Michael J. Meurer, James Bessen, Jennifer Ford
The Private And Social Costs Of Patent Trolls, Michael J. Meurer, James Bessen, Jennifer Ford
Faculty Scholarship
The emergence of nonpracticing entities (NPEs) — firms that purchase and hold patent rights but neither innovate themselves nor use the patents in the production of goods — is supposed to incentivize innovation by providing a ready market for innovators. We test this idea empirically and find that NPEs produce little returns for innovators or for their own shareholders, but they place significant costs on productive firms that violate patents inadvertently. Indeed, it appears that NPEs — often disparagingly called “patent trolls” — discourage productive firms from innovating for fear that they will then be subject to a patent troll …