Inventorship and authorship as attribution rights: An enquiry into the economics of scientific credit

Francesco Lissoni, Fabio Montobbio and Lorenzo Zirulia

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Authorship and inventorship are "attribution rights" upon which individual scientists build their reputation and career. Social and legal norms concerning their distribution within research teams are currently criticized for failing to inform third parties on individual contributions. We examine the case of teams engaged in the "double disclosure" of their research results through both publications and patents, and model the negotiation process taking place between junior or female team members and the senior (male) ones. We suggest that the former may give up inventorship in order to secure authorship, even when entitled to the both. Based on a sample of 680 "patent-publication pairs" (related sets of patents and publications) we show that, very frequently, one or more authors of a publication do not appear as inventors of a related patent. This is less likely to happen for first and last authors, which is in accordance both with our model and the prevailing legal norms on inventorship. However, the probability of exclusion from inventorship also declines with seniority, and increases for women, which is compatible with our model only.

Keywords: authorship; inventorship; economic; credit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Published in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2013, 95, pp.49-69. ⟨10.1016/j.jebo.2013.08.016⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Inventorship and authorship as attribution rights: An enquiry into the economics of scientific credit (2013)
Working Paper: Inventorship and authorship as attribution rights: An enquiry into the economics of scientific credit (2012)
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:hal:journl:hal-01135254

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2013.08.016

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().