Commercial Incentives in Academia

Albert Banal-Estanol () and Ines Macho-Stadler ()

No 08/13, City University Economics Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, City University, London

Abstract: This paper investigates the effects of monetary rewards from commercialisation on the pattern of research. We build a simple repeated model of a researcher capable to obtain innovative ideas. We analyse how academic and market incentives affect the allocation of the researcher’s time between research and development. We argue, however, that technology transfer objectives also affect the choice of research projects. Although commercialisation incentives reduce the time spent in research, they might also induce researchers to conduct research that is more basic in nature, contrary to what the “skewing problem” would presage. Monetary rewards induce a more intensive search for (ex-post) path-breaking innovations, which are more likely to be generated through (ex-ante) basic research programs. These results are shown to hold even if development delays publication.

Keywords: Faculty behaviour; basic vs. applied research (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-ino, nep-ipr and nep-sog
Date: 2008-11
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.city.ac.uk/economics/dps/discussion_papers/0813.pdf (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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cty:dpaper:0813

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in City University Economics Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, City University, London
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Michael Ben-Gad ().