CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Trlifaj, Simon |
|---|---|
| Title | How Knowledge Becomes a Public Good: Permanency, Patents and Secrecy |
| Summary | Knowledge is often considered to be a public good, and many policy proposals take lessons from public goods management and apply them to knowledge creation. I argue that this is an oversimplification. Knowledge can be partially rival and excludable, and companies routinely use secrecy to mitigate the risk of knowledge disclosure. The path of an invention from an inventor to general knowledge is far from straightforward, influenced by many factors including institutional interventions such as patents. I introduce a new property of permanency—the inability to reverse transactions with a good—to analyze how knowledge becomes a public good. To show the effects of permanency empirically, I use assignment data on over four million US patents to test the hypothesis that patents on relatively less reverse-engineerable inventions will more likely be reassigned sooner after the application date. The results of a logistic and survival regression support this hypothesis, which suggests that permanency plays a role in motivations of inventors and companies to patent. Future research on knowledge creation and disclosure and policy proposals for patent reforms thus should employ a more nuanced conceptualization of knowledge, in which permanency plays a role. |
| Supervisor | Cristina Corduneanu-Huci |
| Department | School of Public Policy MPA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/trlifaj_simon.pdf |
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