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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Role Of Data For Ai Startup Growth, James Bessen, Stephen Michael Impink, Lydia Reichensperger, Robert Seamans Jun 2022

The Role Of Data For Ai Startup Growth, James Bessen, Stephen Michael Impink, Lydia Reichensperger, Robert Seamans

Faculty Scholarship

Artificial intelligence (“AI”)-enabled products are expected to drive economic growth. Training data are important for firms developing AI-enabled products; without training data, firms cannot develop or refine their algorithms. This is particularly the case for AI startups developing new algorithms and products. However, there is no consensus in the literature on which aspects of training data are most important. Using unique survey data of AI startups, we find that startups with access to proprietary training data are more likely to acquire venture capital funding.


Ethical Ai Development: Evidence From Ai Startups, James Bessen, Stephen Michael Impink, Lydia Reichensperger, Robert Seamans Mar 2022

Ethical Ai Development: Evidence From Ai Startups, James Bessen, Stephen Michael Impink, Lydia Reichensperger, Robert Seamans

Faculty Scholarship

Artificial Intelligence startups use training data as direct inputs in product development. These firms must balance numerous trade-offs between ethical issues and data access without substantive guidance from regulators or existing judicial precedence. We survey these startups to determine what actions they have taken to address these ethical issues and the consequences of those actions. We find that 58% of these startups have established a set of AI principles. Startups with data-sharing relationships with high-technology firms; that were impacted by privacy regulations; or with prior (non-seed) funding from institutional investors are more likely to establish ethical AI principles. Lastly, startups …


Bilski And The Information Age A Decade Later, Michael J. Meurer Jan 2022

Bilski And The Information Age A Decade Later, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

In the years from State Street in 1999 to Alice in 2014, legal scholars vigorously debated whether patents should be used to incentivize the invention of business methods. That attention has waned just as economists have produced important new research on the topic, and just as artificial intelligence and cloud computing are changing the nature of business method innovation. This chapter rejoins the debate and concludes that the case for patent protection of business methods is weaker now than it was a decade ago.


From Productivity To Firm Growth, James Bessen, Erich Denk Jun 2021

From Productivity To Firm Growth, James Bessen, Erich Denk

Faculty Scholarship

It is widely held that more productive firms grow faster, thus reallocating resources and raising aggregate productivity. Yet little empirical research identifies the features of the mechanisms affecting this process. This paper develops and tests a general model encompassing several mechanisms used to overcome informational frictions to growth. We find that firm size, productivity dispersion, and large firm investments in intangibles are all significantly related to changes in firm growth in response to productivity. These factors can account for much of the decline in the response to productivity since 2000 (Decker et al. 2020). Also, industry concentration is directly related …


Innovation And Optimal Punishment, With Antitrust Applications, Keith N. Hylton, Haizhen Lin Mar 2014

Innovation And Optimal Punishment, With Antitrust Applications, Keith N. Hylton, Haizhen Lin

Faculty Scholarship

This article modifies the optimal punishment analysis by incorporating investment incentives with external benefits. In the models examined, the recommendation that the optimal penalty should internalize the marginal social harm is no longer valid. We focus on antitrust applications. In light of the benefits from innovation, the optimal policy will punish monopolizing firms more leniently than suggested in the standard static model. It may be optimal not to punish the monopolizing firm at all, or to reward the firm rather than punish it. We examine the precise balance between penalty and reward in the optimal punishment scheme.


Against Endowment Theory: Experimental Economics And Legal Scholarship, Greg Klass, Kathryn Zeiler Jan 2013

Against Endowment Theory: Experimental Economics And Legal Scholarship, Greg Klass, Kathryn Zeiler

Faculty Scholarship

Endowment theory holds the mere ownership of a thing causes people to assign greater value to it than they otherwise would. The theory entered legal scholarship in the early 1990s and quickly eclipsed other accounts of how ownership affects valuation. Today, appeals to a generic “endowment effect” can be found throughout the legal literature. More recent experimental results, however, suggest that the empirical evidence for endowment theory is weak at best. When the procedures used in laboratory experiments are altered to rule out alternative explanations, the “endowment effect” disappears. This and other recent evidence suggest that mere ownership does not …


Trial Selection Theory And Evidence, Keith N. Hylton, Haizhen Lin Mar 2012

Trial Selection Theory And Evidence, Keith N. Hylton, Haizhen Lin

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter presents a review of trial selection theory. We use the term “trial selection theory” to refer to models that attempt to explain or predict the characteristics that distinguish cases that are litigated to judgment from those that settle, and the implications of those characteristics for the development of legal doctrine and for important trial outcome parameters, such as the plaintiff win rate. Using this definition, trial selection theory can be said to have started with Priest and Klein (1984).


An Economic Perspective On Preemption, Keith N. Hylton Jan 2012

An Economic Perspective On Preemption, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay has two goals. The first is to present an economic theory of preemption as a choice among regulatory regimes. The optimal regime choice model is used to generate specific implications for the court decisions on preemption of products liability claims. The second objective is to extrapolate from the regime choice model to consider its implications for broader controversies about preemption.


Render Copyright Unto Caesar: On Taking Incentives Seriously, Wendy J. Gordon Jan 2004

Render Copyright Unto Caesar: On Taking Incentives Seriously, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay suggests we bifurcate our thinking. Conventional copyright rules by money, so let it rule the money-bound. Let a different set of rules evolve for more complex uses, particularly when the users have a personal relationship with the utilized text. Much recent scholarship contains dramatic suggestions to secure a freedom to be creative, rewrite, and be imaginative. My work has long sought to defend such freedoms, but I believe we understand imagination and its conditions too little to employ it as a starting point. I suggest instead that we acquire a better conceptual map of the generative process and …


Ralph Sharp Brown, Intellectual Property And The Public Interest--Introduction, Wendy J. Gordon Jan 1999

Ralph Sharp Brown, Intellectual Property And The Public Interest--Introduction, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

Ralph Sharp Brown crossed out the "Junior" that followed his name after his father died. In explanation of the hand-altered stationery, he said (if my recollection holds), "I'm the only one left now." Now, after Ralph's death, there may remain no Ralph Sharp Browns. But there are many law teachers who continue to wage the campaign that Ralph made his life work: to save an interdependent society from unnecessary and stagnating restraints on liberty. In the intellectual property area, Ralph sought to teach us that it can be both right and necessary to give individuals the liberty to "reap without …


Asymmetric Market Failure And Prisoner's Dilemma In Intellectual Property, Wendy J. Gordon Apr 1992

Asymmetric Market Failure And Prisoner's Dilemma In Intellectual Property, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

When competitors engage in unrestrained copying of each others' intangible products, the structure can resemble a prisoner's dilemma in which free choice leads to unnecessarily low individual payoffs and low social welfare. There are many ways to avoid these low payoffs, such as contract enforcement, direct regulation of copying behavior through IP, and direct government subsidies. All of these modes alter the payoff pattern away from prisoner's dilemma.

When should lawmakers place copyright law or other IP law among the prime options to consider?

Because copyright, patent, misappropriation and the like all work through private-property markets, one key is to …