The Sale of Ideas: Strategic Disclosure, Property Rights, and Contracting

James J. Anton and Dennis A. Yao

The Review of Economic Studies, 2002, vol. 69, issue 3, 513-531

Abstract: Ideas are difficult to sell when buyers cannot assess an idea's value before it is revealed and sellers cannot protect a revealed idea. These problems exist in a variety of intellectual property sales ranging from pure ideas to poorly protected inventions and reflect the nonverifiability of key elements of an intellectual property sale. An expropriable partial disclosure can be used as a signal, allowing the seller to obtain payment based on the value of the remaining (undisclosed) know-how. We examine contracting after the disclosure and find that seller wealth is pivotal in supporting a partial disclosure equilibrium and in determining the payoff size. Copyright 2002, Wiley-Blackwell.

Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (162)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/1467-937X.t01-1-00020 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:restud:v:69:y:2002:i:3:p:513-531

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economic Studies is currently edited by Thomas Chaney, Xavier d’Haultfoeuille, Andrea Galeotti, Bård Harstad, Nir Jaimovich, Katrine Loken, Elias Papaioannou, Vincent Sterk and Noam Yuchtman

More articles in The Review of Economic Studies from Review of Economic Studies Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().