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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Abstract: In this paper we contribute to the discussion on whether intellectual property rights foster or hinder innovation by means of a laboratory experiment. We introduce a novel Scrabble-like creativity task that captures most essentialities of a sequential innovation process. We use this task to investigate the effects of intellectual property allowing subjects to assign license fees to their innovations. We find intellectual property to have an adversely effect on welfare as innovations become less frequent and less sophisticated. Communication among innovators is not able to prevent this detrimental effect. Introducing intellectual property results in more basic innovations and subjects fail to exploit the most valuable sequential innovation paths. Subjects act more self-reliant and non-optimally in order to avoid paying license fees. Our results suggest that granting intellectual property rights hinders innovations, especially for sectors characterized by a strong sequentiality in innovation processes. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may Keywords IntroductionThe question whether society should grant intellectual property (IP) rights to innovators has been discussed widely in economics, law and politics. In this paper we contribute to the debate by means of a controlled real-effort laboratory experiment involving creativity. We introduce a novel design that allows us to create counterfactual situations and test directly the effects of IP rights on the innovation rate and welfare of a laboratory economy.The issues of what are the optimal extent and nature of IP rights have been long debated, but neither theoretical nor empirical research has provided a final answer. Theoretical results cut both ways. Conventional wisdom is largely derived from static models, and does not robustly survive in dynamic, sequential innovation models that best describe sectors characterized by cumulative research (Scotchmer 1991). The question of IP in dynamic, sequential models has been raised by several theoretical studies. They tend to offer a less positive view of the effect of IP on the rate of innovations and thus aggregate welfare. Green and Scotchmer (1995) study the division of profits between sequential innovators and suggest that it is desirable to minimize patent life. Moschini and Yerokhin (2008) In this paper we exploit the unique characteristic of laboratory experiments of allowing to easily build counterfactual situations while retaining control...

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Voluntary agreements (VAs) in environmental policy can increase the attention and commitment of individual actors within defined groups and social contexts. However while VAs can be usefully applied in a general framework of responsive regulation, they have a significant potential to fail if they are intended to replace command‐and‐control or economic incentives. As VAs are neither cost‐effective nor equal to command‐and‐control in enforcing a given environmental goal, they should only supplement regular environmental policy instruments. The environmental effectiveness of agreements depends on certain characteristics. On the basis of four case studies this paper shows that cultural context matters as does a framework of clear targets and distinct responsibilities. Effectiveness is also high if the information gathered through regular monitoring, reporting and verification of performance is collected independently and made available to the public. Given this it is concluded that VAs are a treat in environmental policy if they are applied as a supplementary measure in a mixed policy approach, but once they replace command‐and‐control and economic incentives as a purely deregulatory measure VAs quickly turn into a trick. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.