Optimum Contracts for Research Personnel, Research Employment, and the Establishment of "Rival" Enterprises

Ariel Pakes and Shmuel Nitzan

Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper considers the problem of hiring scientists for research and development projects when one takes explicit account of the fact that the scientist may be able to use the information acquired during the project in a rival enterprise. Management's problem is to determine an optimum labor policy for its project. The policy consists of an employment decision and a labor contract. Given optimum behavior, it is straightforward to analyze the effect of the potential for mobility of scientific personnel on project profitability and on research employment. We also formalize conditions under which one would expect to observe a scientist leaving his employer to set up or join a rival.

Date: 1983
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (105)

Published in Journal of Labor Economics

Downloads: (external link)
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3428538/Pakes_OptimumContracts.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Optimum Contracts for Research Personnel, Research Employment, and the Establishment of "Rival" Enterprises (1983)
Working Paper: Optimum Contracts for Research Personnel, Research Employment, and the Establishment of "Rival" Enterprises (1982)
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:hrv:faseco:3428538

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office for Scholarly Communication ().