Demand Shocks, Procurement Policies, and the Nature of Medical Innovation: Evidence from Wartime Prosthetic Device Patents

Jeffrey Clemens and Parker Rogers

No 26679, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We analyze wartime prosthetic device patents to investigate how procurement policy affects the cost, quality, and quantity of medical innovation. Analyzing whether inventions emphasize cost and/or quality requires generating new data. We do this by first hand-coding the economic traits emphasized in 1,200 patent documents. We then train a machine learning algorithm and apply the trained models to a century's worth of medical and mechanical patents that form our analysis sample. In our analysis of these new data, we find that the relatively stingy, fixed-price contracts of the Civil War era led inventors to focus broadly on reducing costs, while the less cost-conscious procurement contracts of World War I did not. We provide a conceptual framework that highlights the economic forces that drive this key finding. We also find that inventors emphasized dimensions of product quality (e.g., a prosthetic's appearance or comfort) that aligned with differences in buyers' preferences across wars. Finally, we find that the Civil War and World War I procurement shocks led to substantial increases in the quantity of prosthetic device patenting relative to patenting in other medical and mechanical technology classes. We conclude that procurement environments can significantly shape the scientific problems with which inventors engage, including the choice to innovate on quality or cost.

JEL-codes: H57 I1 O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-cta, nep-hea, nep-his, nep-ino and nep-ipr
Note: AG DAE EH IO LS PE PR
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

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Working Paper: Demand Shocks, Procurement Policies, and the Nature of Medical Innovation: Evidence from Wartime Prosthetic Device Patents (2020)
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