Public choice perspectives on intellectual property

Abstract

We mine two public choice traditions for insights into intellectual property rights: the Virginia school, centered on James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, and the Bloomington or Institutional Analysis and Development school, centered on Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom. We apply the perspectives of each school to issues of intellectual property and develop new insights, questions, and focuses of attention. We also explore tensions and synergies between the two schools on issues of intellectual property.

A New Institutional Approach to Innovation Policy

“…Goolsbee (), for instance, finds that the benefits from big science funding are largely captured in researchers' salaries. Dourado and Tabarrok () explain how intellectual property creates enormous opportunities for rent‐seeking, while ignoring the possibility of private ordering institutional solutions; that is, the commons. Greenberg () catalogues the enormous rents created by US science and technology policy.…”

Institutional solutions to free-riding in peer-to-peer networks: a case study of online pirate communities

“…This paper is closely connected to the literature on internet governance (see Benson, 2005;Christin, 2012;Dourado and Tabarrok, 2015;Hardy and Norgaard, 2016;Hess and Ostrom, 2007;Kollock, 1998;Kollock and Smith, 1996;Mueller, 2010;Safner, 2016). Kollock (1998), for example, considers the difficulty of applying Ostrom's framework to online communities given the fluidity of identity and the difficulty in enforcing boundaries in online organizations.…”

“…. are decreased while the effects of free-riding are often amplified.” More recently, however, both Dourado and Tabarrok (2015) and Safner (2016) use Ostrom's framework to explain the success of Wikipedia, suggesting that many of the difficulties of earlier online organizations can be overcome. My analysis contributes to this literature by demonstrating the robustness of Ostrom's framework for analyzing online governance in the “hard case” where illegality adds significantly to the cost of contribution and prevents an important design principle – the recognized right to govern – from being met.…”

Boosting firm dynamism and performance in China

“…In China, such courts are expected to strengthen IPR protection. A key difficulty experienced elsewhere, however, is that a specialised court system is more likely to lead to interest-group capture (Dourado and Tabarrok, 2015).…”