Digital Commons Network^™

Contract Adjudication In A Collaborative Economy, Matthew C. Jennejohn

Matthew C Jennejohn

In order to explore the debate between contextualist versus formalist contract interpretation, this article examines dispute resolution procedures in a novel class of contracts: agreements governing inter-firm collaboration. Analysis of these contracts reveals two phenomena: first, agreements governing collaboration include arbitration clauses more frequently than other commercial contracts; and second, these agreements routinely situate arbitration at the summit of complex escalation procedures. These observations raise, in turn, the following inter-related questions: first, why do collaborators avoid litigation; and second, what makes escalated and private dispute resolution appropriate?

The article’s central claim is that litigation is shunned because contemporary contextualist contract …

Why Typefaces Proliferate Without Copyright Protection, Blake Fry

Blake Fry

Classic economic theory predicts that without copyright protection authors and publishers would not have sufficient incentive to invest the time or money needed to produce or distribute new works, and the public would suffer a shortage. Copyrights are an attempt to solve this problem. By granting a monopoly to the author of an expressive work the government gives him the sole right to copy it. If only the author has this right, authors will get a reasonable rate of return, and thus a sufficient incentive to create new works. However, empirical evidence on whether adequate expressive works would be created …

Untapped Inventive Potential In U.S. Communities, Michael Meehan

Michael Meehan PhD

This paper combines the 2000 U.S. Census data and the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) Patent Citation Data File in order to analyze how certain community-level population and community factors correlate with overall patenting and relative rates of assigned and unassigned patenting. Among the interesting findings discussed are that, in addition to the fact that overall patenting increased with higher populations of employed people, higher populations of people with either terminal undergraduate or master’s degrees, and higher median income, the overall rates of patenting decreased, and did not merely remain the level, as the other sectors of a communities’ …

Innovation And Climate Change Policy, Joshua S. Gans

Joshua S Gans

This paper examines then notion that more stringent climate change policy will induce innovation in environmentally friendly technologies. While past work has been concerned that such policies may stimulate such innovation at the expense of innovation elsewhere in the economy, the model presented here challenges the presumption that environmentally friendly innovation will be increased. It is demonstrated that a tighter emissions cap will reduce the scale of fossil fuel usage and that this effect will diminish incentives to improve fossil fuel efficiencies. At the same time, such policies may stimulate innovation that improves the efficiency of alternative energy but that …

Technological Diversity, Scientific Excellence And The Location Of Inventive Activities Abroad: The Case Of Nanotechnology, Andrea Fernández-Ribas, Philip Shapira

Philip Shapira

Our contribution to the expanding literature on the globalization of research and innovation is to investigate the extent to which sector-specific developments in an emerging technology (such as increasing interdisciplinarity and complexity) affect inventive activities developed abroad. We look at how technological diversity and scientific excellence of host countries in the field of nanotechnology affect the development of inventive activities by US multinational companies (MNCs). We identify the most active US-based MNCs in nanotechnology-related patenting and examine location decisions of these companies and their international subsidiaries. Econometric results confirm our hypothesis that technological breadth of host countries positively influence the …

Innovazione Tecnologica, Organizzazione E Produttività Nella Manifattura Italiana: Evidenze Recenti Per L’Area Nec, Riccardo Cappelli, Nicola Matteucci

Nicola Matteucci

Recenti statistiche evidenziano che il problema della bassa crescita ed efficienza dell’Italia risiede principalmente nella dinamica della produttività totale dei fattori (total factor productivity, o TFP), in netto peggioramento proprio nel settore manifatturiero. Inoltre, tra le spiegazioni del supposto declino economico ed industriale dell’Italia, quelle che si concentrano sulle variabili tecnologico-organizzative sembrano tornare in primo piano, anche alla luce del dibattito sulla “strategia di Lisbona”. Questi temi sono ricollegabili al dibattito sull’evoluzione strutturale e organizzativa del modello NEC e sulle sue capacità di risposta alle sfide dell’economia globale. Il presente lavoro studia l’evoluzione della relazione tra R&S, organizzazione e produttività …

Laboratories Of Democracy? Policy Innovation In Decentralized Governments, Brian D. Galle, Joseph K. Leahy

Brian D. Galle

Innovations in government produce positive externalities for other jurisdictions. Theory therefore predicts that local government will tend to produce a lower than optimal amount of innovation, as officials will prefer to free-ride on innovation by others. As Susan Rose-Ackerman observed in 1980, these two predictions, if true, tend to undermine arguments by proponents of federated government that decentralization will lead to many competing “laboratories of democracy.” In this paper, which is aimed primarily at legal academics, we review and critically assess nearly three decades of responses to Rose-Ackerman’s arguments, none of which have been discussed in depth in the legal …