Law | Open Access Articles | Digital Commons Network™

A Comparative Approach To Coordination: How Apes, Monkeys And Humans Respond To An Assurance Game With Equivalent Procedures, Bart Wilson, Sarah Brosnan

Bart J Wilson

Our research directly compares coordinated decision making across the entire primate lineage, including a new-world monkey, an old-world monkey, an ape, and humans, to help understand how decision making is different between these species. We find that the ability to coordinate on a mutually beneficial decision does vary across species, that there is variability within each taxonomic group, and that this variation overlaps between groups. Each species represents a continuum, with pairs of each species ranging from random outcomes to those which coordinate on the payoff dominant outcome. What differs is the frequency of payoff dominant outcomes within each species.

Go to article

An Experiment On Protecting Intellectual Property, Bart Wilson

Bart J Wilson

We conduct a laboratory experiment to explore whether the protection of intellectual property (IP) incentivizes people to create non-rivalrous knowledge goods, foregoing the production of other rivalrous goods. In the contrasting treatment with no IP protection, participants are free to resell and remake non-rivalrous knowledge goods originally created by others. We find that creators reap substantial profits when IP is protected and that rampant pirating is not uncommon when there is no IP protection. But most importantly, we find that IP protection in and of itself is neither necessary nor sufficient for generating wealth from the discovery of knowledge goods.

Go to article