Public-private partnerships in fostering outer space innovations

Elliot Choi, Alexandre Bayen and Gordon Rausser

Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley, Working Paper Series from Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley

Abstract: As public and private institutions recognize the role of space exploration as a catalyst for economic growth, various areas of innovation are expected to emerge as drivers of the space economy. These include space transportation, in-space manufacturing, bioproduction, in-space agriculture, nuclear launch, and propulsion systems, as well as satellite services and their maintenance. However, the current nature of space as an open-access resource and global commons presents a systemic risk for exuberant competition for space goods and services, which may result in a tragedy of the commons dilemma. In the race among countries to capture the value of space exploration, NASA, American research universities, and private companies can avoid any coordination failures by collaborating in a public-private research and development partnership (PPRDP) structure. We present such a structure founded upon the principles of polycentric autonomous governance, which incorporate a decentralized autonomous organization framework and specialized research clusters. By advancing an alignment of incentives among the specified participatory members, PPRDPs can play a pivotal role in stimulating open-source research by creating positive knowledge spillover effects and agglomeration externalities as well as embracing the nonlinear decomposition paradigm that may blur the distinction between basic and applied research.

Keywords: agglomeration externalities; economics of space; intellectual property; polycentric governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-10-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/13b2f17s.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdl:agrebk:qt13b2f17s

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley, Working Paper Series from Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().