Academic commercialization and changing nature of academic cooperation

Sotaro Shibayama ()

Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 2015, vol. 25, issue 2, 513-532

Abstract: Recent economic policies emphasize the role of academic science in technological innovation and economic growth and encourage universities and individual academics to engage in commercial activities. In this trend of academic commercialization, a growing concern has been expressed that its potential incompatibility with the traditional norms of open science could undermine the cooperative climate in academia. Drawing on the framework of evolution of the cooperation, this study examines the changing nature of academic cooperation under the current policy trend. In an ideal state of open science, academics are supposed to cooperate gratis and unconditionally. However, results predict that the commercialized regime could compromise underlying mechanisms of cooperation and allow defectors to prevail. As the trend further grows, academics would become more demanding of direct reward in exchange for cooperation, and they would refrain from engaging in cooperation but would prefer to work independently. Some interventions (e.g., centralized rewarding) could mitigate the problem but require delicate system design. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Keywords: Indirect reciprocity; Evolution of cooperation; Social norms; Open science; Academic commercialization; Academic Entrepreneurship; Evolutionary game theory; I23; L26; O33; C73; O38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00191-014-0387-z (text/html)
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:spr:joevec:v:25:y:2015:i:2:p:513-532

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/191/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00191-014-0387-z

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Evolutionary Economics is currently edited by Uwe Cantner, Elias Dinopoulos, Horst Hanusch and Luigi Orsenigo

More articles in Journal of Evolutionary Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().