Inducement Prizes and Innovation

Liam Brunt, Josh Lerner and Tom Nicholas
Additional contact information
Tom Nicholas: Harvard Business School

No 25/2011, Discussion Paper Series in Economics from Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Economics

Abstract: We examine the effect of prizes on innovation using data on awards for technological development offered by the Royal Agricultural Society of England at annual competitions between 1839 and 1939. We find large effects of the prizes on competitive entry and we also detect an impact of the prizes on the quality of contemporaneous patents, especially when prize categories were set by a strict rotation scheme, thereby mitigating the potentially confounding effect that they targeted only “hot” technology sectors. Prizes encouraged competition and medals were more important than monetary awards. The boost to innovation we observe cannot be explained by the re-direction of existing inventive activity.

Keywords: Awards; Patents; Contests. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N40 O30 O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2011-12-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino, nep-ipr and nep-pr~
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Inducement Prizes and Innovation (2012)
Working Paper: Inducement Prizes and Innovation (2008)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:nhheco:2011_025

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