Intellectual property reform in the laboratory

Ismaël Benslimane, Paolo Crosetto, Raùl Magni-Berton () and Simon Varaine ()
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Ismaël Benslimane: UGA - Université Grenoble Alpes
Raùl Magni-Berton: ESPOL-LAB - ESPOL-LAB - ESPOL - European School of Political and Social Sciences / École Européenne de Sciences Politiques et Sociales - ICL - Institut Catholique de Lille - UCL - Université catholique de Lille
Simon Varaine: PACTE - Pacte, Laboratoire de sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - UGA - Université Grenoble Alpes - IEPG - Sciences Po Grenoble-UGA - Institut d'études politiques de Grenoble - UGA - Université Grenoble Alpes

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Abstract: This study experimentally captures the effects of reforming intellectual property (IP) and measures whether abolishing IP after a vote can reduce the creativity of the most talented innovators. The subjects start in a baseline setting with IP and then move to a second unannounced phase in which IP has or has not been abolished. First, we manipulate exogenously the presence or absence of the possibility to vote for or against IP. Second, we manipulate the information given to the subjects after the first phase. In the information treatment, we inform the subjects right before the vote that a previous experiment that used the same design (Brüggemann et al., 2016) showed that the no IP regime significantly increased players' gains. Contrary to preregistered expectations, the results show that undergoing a vote does not reduce overall creativity. Actually, the most talented innovators do not vote in favor of IP. Rather, the subjects who vote in favor of IP are those who benefit relatively more from royalties. Surprisingly, no correlation is found between these two populations: the IP in our experiment seems to not reward the best players, but the players who choose an ‘IP-driven' strategy of focusing on more extensible words while simultaneously relying on their own creations forego cross-fertilization with other players. These are relatively low-skilled players who choose a rent-seeking strategy that maximizes gains from the IP system itself. There are plausible arguments that this result is at least partly valid in the real world, especially for complex and highly sequential innovations where it has been proven that patent trolls and anti-competitive strategies are important.

Keywords: Intellectual property; Reform; Experiment; Patents; Institutional reform; Vote; Laboratory experiment; Innovation policy; Real effort task; Creativity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-02
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Published in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2023, 206, pp.204-221. ⟨10.1016/j.jebo.2022.12.005⟩

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Journal Article: Intellectual property reform in the laboratory (2023)
Working Paper: Intellectual property reform in the laboratory (2020)
Working Paper: Intellectual property reform in the laboratory (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-04215093

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2022.12.005

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