licensing effect in consumer choice abstract most choices in the real world follow other choices or judgments the authors show that a prior choice which activates and boosts a positive self concept subsequently licenses the choice of a more self indulgent option the authors propose that licensing can operate by committing to a virtuous act in a preceding choice which reduces negative self attributions associated with the purchase of relative luxuries five studies demonstrate the proposed licensing effect of a prior commitment to a virtuous act on subsequent choice consistent with the authors theory the preference for an indulgent option diminishes if the licensing task is attributed to an external motivation the authors also report a mediation analysis in support of their theoretical explanation that the licensing effect operates by providing a temporary boost in the relevant self concept

social norms and energy conservation beyond the us abstract the seminal studies by allcott and mullainathan 2010 allcott 2011 and allcott and rogers 2014 show that social comparison based home energy reports her are a cost effective climate policy intervention in the us our paper demonstrates the context dependency of this result in most industrialized countries average electricity consumption and carbon intensity are well below us levels consequently her interventions can only become cost effective if treatment effect sizes are substantially higher for germany we provide evidence from a large scale randomized controlled trial that effect sizes are in fact considerably lower than in the us we conclude by illustrating that targeting highly responsive subgroups is crucial to reach cost effectiveness and by identifying the few countries in which her are promising policy instruments

what are households willing to pay for improved water access results from a meta analysis abstract although several factors contribute to low rates of access to improved water and sanitation in the developing world it is especially important to understand and measure household demand for these services one valuable source of information regarding demand is the growing empirical literature that has applied stated preference methods to estimate households willingness to pay wtp because it is difficult to generalize and support planning based on this scattered literature we conduct a meta analysis to take stock of the worldwide sample of household wtp for improved drinking water services using 171 wtp estimates drawn from 60 studies we first describe this sample and then examine the potential factors that explain variation in wtp estimates our results suggest that households are willing to pay between approximately 3 and 30 per month for improvements in water access specifically in line with economic theory and intuition wtp is sensitive to scope the magnitude of improvement in drinking water services as well as household income and stated preference elicitation method we demonstrate how our results can be used to predict household level wtp for selected improvements in drinking water access in regions with low coverage and find that private benefits exceed the cost of provision

global and domestic utilization of industrial relevant science patent citation analysis of science technology interactions and knowledge flows abstract the development of science based technologies may draw heavily on codified and tacit outputs from both domestic research bases and foreign sources having a view of the scientific underpinnings of these technical innovations and related knowledge diffusion and utilization processes especially those concerning public financed basic research is of major importance to policymakers nowadays some of those scientific and technical inputs are pivotal to technical inventions and are acknowledged as such by explicit references citations to related research papers in the reference list on the corresponding patents this case study deals with citations to dutch authored research papers on uspto patents granted during the period 1987 1996 results of the citation analysis reveal several important features of contributions made by the dutch science base to dutch invented and or foreign invented patents such as 1 a marked overall increase of patent citations to dutch research papers and 2 significant differences between domestic and foreign citation patterns where 3 domestic citation links are dominated by author inventor self citations and patents originating from the large r d intensive multinational firms such as philips these findings provide new empirical evidence that patent citation analysis produces systemic quantitative data providing strategic background information regarding nation specific and sector specific factors in domestic and cross border science technology linkages and knowledge flows

how many more cites is a 3 000 open access fee buying you empirical evidence from a natural experiment we analyze the effect of open access oa status of journal articles on citations using cross sectional and panel data from mathematics and economics we perform negative binomial poisson and generalized method of moments instrumental variable methods regressions we benefit from a natural experiment via hybrid oa pilot agreements citations to pre prints allow us to identify the intrinsic quality of articles prior to journal publication overall our analysis suggests that there is no hybrid oa citation benefit however for the subpopulation of articles without oa pre or post prints we find positive hybrid oa effects for the full sample and each discipline separately jel l17 o33 a11

the use and abuse of meta analysis in environmental and natural resource economics an assessment motivated by the 2006 report of a work group appointed by the environmental protection agency epa this paper examines the present state of meta analysis in environmental economics and offers recommendations for its future use to this end we summarize and assess 140 meta analyses from 125 published and unpublished studies covering 17 topical categories in environmental and resource economics first we provide several generic meta analysis models as reference points and discuss major estimation issues five econometric issues are identified as part of a complete analysis 1 sample selection criteria 2 basic data summary 3 primary data heterogeneity 4 heteroskedasticity and 5 non independence of multiple observations from primary studies second a tabular summary is presented for the 140 meta analyses with respect to estimation methods third a narrative summary is presented for 19 meta analyses including the three value of statistical life studies examined by the epa work group and one analysis from each of 16 other categories fourth we offer a set of best practice guidelines for future meta analyses in this and other areas of economics last the paper comments on the use of meta analytic methods for benefit transfers of environmental values

environmental regulation and competitiveness empirical evidence on the porter hypothesis from european manufacturing sectors abstract this paper investigates the weak and strong versions of porter hypothesis ph focusing on the manufacturing sectors of 17 european countries between 1997 and 2009 the hypothesis that well crafted and well enforced regulation would benefit both the environment and the firm was originally proposed by porter 1991 and porter and van der linde 1995 to date the literature has analyzed the impact of environmental regulation on innovation and on productivity mostly in separate analyses and focusing on the usa the few existing contributions on europe study the effect of environmental regulation either on green innovation or on performance indicators such as exports we instead look at overall innovation and productivity impacts first focusing on overall innovative activity allows us to account for potential opportunity costs of induced innovations second productivity impacts are arguably the most relevant indicators for the strong ph as a proxy of environmental policy stringency we use pollution abatement and control expenditures pace one of the few sectoral level indicators available we remedy upon its main drawback namely potential endogeneity by adopting an instrumental variable estimation approach we find evidence of a positive impact of environmental regulation on the output of innovation activity as proxied by patents thus providing support in favor of the weak ph this result is in line with most of the literature on the other front we find no evidence in favor of the strong ph as productivity appears to be unaffected by the degree of pollution control and abatement efforts

why are some independent inventors heroes and others hobbyists the moderating role of technological diversity and specialization abstract despite a substantial body of research investigating the market significance of inventions by independent inventors relatively little attention has been devoted to understanding their technological significance a recent study conducted by dahlin k taylor m fichman m 2004 today s edisons or weekend hobbyists technical impact and success of inventions by independent inventors res policy 33 1167 1183 on the tennis racket industry shows that independent inventors are a heterogeneous group which includes both heroes who contribute substantially to technological progress and hobbyists who make only a marginal contribution what is not asked and therefore not explained is why this distinction arises in this paper we focus on the type of prior technological knowledge in terms of technological specialization and diversity applied by independent inventors and their corporate counterparts as a factor explaining differences in technological impact our empirical setting is the field of medical equipment technology we find that independent inventors are more sensitive to the negative effects of technological diversity than their corporate counterparts furthermore our study reveals that technological specialization pays off more for independent inventors than for their corporate counterparts therefore those independent inventors who apply low degrees of diversity and high degrees of specialization are capable of reaching the same level as or even outperforming their corporate counterparts thus becoming heroes based on our findings we discuss implications for research and corporate practice

the two faces of competition dynamic resourcefulness and the hypercompetitive shift competition in the american economy has fundamentally changed over the last few decades from static to dynamic this study labels this important change the hypercompetitive shift and documents it across 200 industries of the us manufacturing sector during i958 to 1991 for industries that undergo a hypercompetitive shift there is an increase in the cross firm variance in performance and a rotation in the value rivalry relationship from a negative association to an inverted u as a consequence of these competitive changes the strategic focus of firms shifts from careful exploitation of given highly durable strategic assets to the steady creation of many new rapidly depreciable ones the key driver of hypercompetitive shift is the dynamic resourcefulness of an industry or the ease with which new strategic assets can be created determinants of dynamic resourcefulness include the dynamism of related transactors notably consumers and suppliers the knowledge base of the industry and structural condi

firm size and the nature of innovation within industries the case of process and product r d the effect of firm size on the allocation of r d effort between process and product innovation is examined it is hypothesized that relative to product innovations process innovations are less saleable in disembodied form and spawn less growth this implies that the returns to process r d will depend more on the firm s output at the time it conducts its r d than the returns to product r d incorporating this distinction in a simple model the authors derive and test predictions about how the fraction of r d devoted to process innovation varies with firm size within industries

persistence of innovative activities sectoral patterns of innovation and international technological specialization abstract in this paper we focus on the role of persistence and heterogeneity of innovative activities at the level of the firm in determining the patterns of technological change in different industries and countries we ask are persistence and heterogeneity associated with higher degrees of concentration in innovative activities stability in the ranking of innovators and lower degrees of entry and exit in the population of innovators or do the patterns of innovation depend on other variables like firm size and industrial concentration moreover what are the relationships between the patterns of innovative activities their determinants and the technological specialization of countries we compute indicators of persistence and heterogeneity using the otaf spru patent database at the firm level for five european countries over the period 1969 1986 for 33 technological classes then we estimate the relationships between our indicators of the sectoral patterns of innovative activities and international technological specialization on the one hand and our indicators of persistence heterogeneity and market structure on the other results show that persistence and asymmetries are important and strongly related phenomena that affect the patterns of innovative activities across countries and sectors while the role of market structure variables is less clear finally international technological specialization is associated to a competitive core of persistent innovators

sources procedures and microeconomic effects of innovation fabio arcangeli paul david frank engelman christopher freeman massimo moggi richard nelson luigi orsenigo nathan rosenberg michele salvati g n von tunzelman two anonymous referees and the participants at the meeting of the committee on distribution growth and technical progress of the italian national research council cnr rome november 16 1985 have helped with various redraftings a particularly grateful acknowledgment is for the insightful and patient help of moses abramovitz this work has been undertaken at the science policy research unit spru university of sussex as part of the research program of the designated research centre sponsored by the economic and social research council esrc earlier support to the research that led to this paper by the italian national research council cnr is also gratefully acknowledged the statistical research has been undertaken with the assistance of stephano brioschi ilaria fornari and giovannu prennushi

firm size and r d intensity a re examination using data from the federal trade commission s line of business program and survey measures of technological opportunity and appropriability conditions this paper finds that overall firm size has a very small statistically insignificant effect on business unit r d intensity when either fixed industry effects or measured industry characteristics are taken into account business unit size has no effect on the r d intensity of business units that perform r d but it affects the probability of conducting r d business unit and firm size jointly explain less than one per cent of the variance in r d industry effects explain nearly half the variance two sets of well known hypotheses are associated with the later work of joseph schumpeter the first concerns the effects of market concentration on research and development investment and on innovative performance the second bears on the effects of firm size on r d and innovation in a recent paper levin cohen and mowery 1985 we re examined the first set of hypotheses simple regressions at the line of business level replicated the established findings that both r d intensity and innovative performance first increase and then decrease as industrial concentration rises the effect of concentration however was sharply attenuated when we controlled for interindustry differences in technological opportunity and in the appropriability of returns from new technology our results suggested that it is probably unwarranted to conclude that market concentration favors r d investment and innovation in this paper we investigate the schumpeterian hypothesis that large size is conducive to r d investment this relationship has been studied at least as intensively as the link between concentration and r d but our approach is novel in two respects first using data collected by the federal trade

a role based ecology of technological change this article considers what factors determine whether an innovation becomes a foundation for future technological developments rather than a dea end the authors introduce the concept of the technological niche which includes a focal innovation the innovations on which the focal innovations builds the innovations that build upon the focal innovation and the technological ties among the innovations within the niche using patents and patent citations to measure characteristics of innovation niches within the semiconductor industry the authors show that the size of the niche and the status of the actors within the niche have a positive effect on the likelihood that subsequent innovations will build upon the focal innovation competitive intensity within the niche has a negative effect on this likelihood

patentability r d direction and cumulative innovation we present a model of cumulative innovation where firms can conduct r d in both a safe and a risky direction innovations in the risky direction produce quality improvements with higher expected sizes and variances as patentability standards rise an innovation in the risky direction is less likely to receive a patent that replaces the current technology which decreases the static incentive for new entrants to conduct risky r d but increases their dynamic incentive because of the longer duration and hence higher reward for incumbency these together with a strategic substitution and a market structure effect result in an inverted u shape in the risky direction but a u shape in the safe direction for the relationship between r d intensity and patentability standards there exists a patentability standard that induces the efficient innovation direction whereas r d is biased towards against the risky direction under lower higher standards the optimal patentability standard may distort the r d direction to increase the industry innovation rate that is socially deficient

innovation diversity and diffusion a self organisation model a number of features of innovation diffusion are identified appropriability diversity expectations selection learning and spillover externalities a dynamic model is formul ated to embed the diffusion question into a more general framework of disequilibrium competition the model incorporates distinct vintage structures reflecting a change in technological trajectory learning by using a nd expectations driven investment rules of thumb simulation studies reveal robust quasi logistic curves but a complicated pattern of net market share gains and losses uncertainty regarding the rationality of early or late adoption it is argued ensures that the requisite behavioral variety is present to generate these diffusion patterns copyright 1988 by royal economic society

the size distribution of innovating firms in the uk 1945 1983 a survey of 4 378 significant innovations shows that firms with fewer than 1 000 employees commercialized a much larger share than is indicated by their share of r and d expenditures innovations per employee have been consistently above average in firms with more than 10 000 employees and have become so in firms with fewer than 1 000 intersectoral variation in the size distribution of innovating firms can be explained as a function of r and d based technological opportunities and of technological ease of entry by user firms with principal activities outside the sector copyright 1987 by blackwell publishing ltd

household energy use applying behavioural economics to understand consumer decision making and behaviour household energy conservation has emerged as a major challenge and opportunity for researchers practitioners and policymakers consumers also seem to be gaining greater awareness of the value and need for sustainable energy practices particularly amid growing public concerns over greenhouse gas emissions and climate change yet even with adequate knowledge of how to save energy and a professed desire to do so many consumers still fail to take noticeable steps towards energy efficiency and conservation there is often a sizeable discrepancy between peoples self reported knowledge values attitudes and intentions and their observable behaviour examples include the well known knowledge action gap and value action gap but neither is household energy consumption driven primarily by financial incentives and the rational pursuit of material interests in fact people sometimes respond in unexpected and undesirable ways to rewards and sanctions intended to shift consumers cost benefit calculus in favour of sustainable behaviours why is this so why is household energy consumption and conservation difficult to predict from either core values or material interests by drawing on critical insights from behavioural economics and psychology we illuminate the key cognitive biases and motivational factors that may explain why energy related behaviour so often fails to align with either the personal values or material interests of consumers understanding these psychological phenomena can make household and community responses to public policy interventions less surprising and in parallel can help us design more cost effective and mass scalable behavioural solutions to encourage renewable and sustainable energy use among consumers

risky recombinations institutional gatekeeping in the innovation process theories of innovation and technical change posit that inventions that combine knowledge across technology domains have greater impact than inventions drawn from a single domain the evidence for this claim comes mostly from research on patented inventions and ignores failed patent applications we draw on insights from research into institutional gatekeeping to theorize that to be granted patent applications that span technological domains must have higher quality than otherwise comparable narrower applications using data on failed and successful patent applications we estimate an integrated two stage model that accounts for this differential selection we find that more domain spanning patent applications are less likely to be approved and that controlling for this differential selection reduces the estimated effect of knowledge recombination on innovative impact by about one third by conceptualizing the patent approval process as a form of institutional gatekeeping this paper highlights the in

social norms and pro environmental behavior a review of the evidence in light of the growing attention that social norm interventions have garnered as policy tools we review the current body of evidence on their effectiveness with respect to pro environmental behaviors we identify the various conceptualizations of social norms currently in use and inventory the experimental economics and social psychology literature that has examined the impacts of social norm interventions on pro environmental behavior for each study included in this inventory we note several contextual features the data collection and analytical methods used and any significant main effects attributed to the social norm intervention we also review several theoretical models of behavior that incorporate social norms based on this empirical and theoretical review we draw a number of policy implications and identify avenues for future research on the role of social norms with respect to pro environmental behavior

valuing smart meters abstract this paper assesses to what extent consumers are willing to make use of the features and capabilities offered by smart meters via a choice experiment households are offered the choice between a set of smart meters described by six attributes impact on the comfort and privacy level functionality visibility cost savings and investment outlay we estimate a main effects conditional logit model and a main effects random parameter logit model including interactions with socio demographic characteristics the results show that households have heterogeneous preferences for some attributes but not for others the estimates are used to assess marginal willingness to pay values from a policy perspective our findings suggest that sufficient effort should be devoted to designing the smart metering devices and to informing households without careful preparation a mandatory or voluntary roll out of smart meters risks to be unsuccessful because device characteristics do not meet consumer needs

the role of knowledge in r d efficiency past research has recognized that both demand and capability influence the allocation of r d resources scholars have had an easier time getting a grip on demand than on capability while it has been recognized that knowledge is an important part of capability to date formalization of knowledge and its role in r d activity has been unsatisfactory this paper models the role of knowledge in r d various sources of such knowledge are considered the model throws a different light on analyses that employ a knowledge capital stock and also illuminates the dual private and public nature of technological knowledge

uncertain intellectual property conditions and knowledge appropriation strategies evidence from the genomics industry innovating science and technology based firms often endure a sustained period of uncertain intellectual property rights ipr protection before patents could be granted to their valuable knowledge assets this problem is exacerbated as firms increasingly develop their innovations or operate in countries with weak ipr institutional environments but how does ipr uncertainty affect firms strategy toward knowledge appropriation capturing of economic value from their knowledge assets and toward providing access to these knowledge assets drawing on research from the economics of science and intellectual property strategy we examine this question using a novel panel data covering 362 firms and organizations in the knowledge intensive genomics industry based on all genomics patents and matching papers from 1988 to 2005 we find that under uncertain ipr conditions firms reveal and accumulate more knowledge through open science follow on publishing but shift to knowledge appropriation through commercial science follow on patenting when ipr uncertainty is narrowed this effect is most salient when firms develop their knowledge assets or operate under strong ipr institutional regime for highly science based knowledge assets firms continue tapping into open science for access and reciprocity in knowledge acquisition from the scientific community these findings highlight the role of patent grant as a potential lever to shape firms knowledge processes and long term innovative capacity and the emergence of a concerted science strategy employed by firms

r d appropriability opportunity and market structure new evidence on some schumpeterian hypotheses one of the largest bodies of literature in the field of industrial organization is devoted to the interpretation and testing of several hypotheses advanced by joseph schumpeter 1950 concerning innovation and industrial market structure one set of hypotheses focuses on the role of firm size as a determinant of r d spending and the rate of technological advance another set focuses on the effect of market concentration on r d and technological advance in this paper we reexamine the latter set of hypotheses at the industry level using new data on r d appropriability and technological opportunity collected by levin et al 1984 in a survey of r d executives in 130 industries

behavioral economics and energy conservation a systematic review of non price interventions and their causal effects abstract research from economics and psychology suggests that behavioral interventions can be a powerful climate policy instrument this paper provides a systematic review of the existing empirical evidence on non price interventions targeting energy conservation behavior of private households specifically we analyze four nudge like interventions referred to as social comparison commitment devices goal setting and labeling in 44 international studies comprising 105 treatments this paper differs from previous systematic reviews by solely focusing on studies that permit the identification of causal effects we find that all four interventions have the potential to significantly reduce energy consumption of private households yet effect sizes vary immensely we conclude by emphasizing the importance of impact evaluations before rolling out behavioral policy interventions at scale

striving to be green the adoption of total quality environmental management many firms are undertaking environment friendly organizational change by applying the philosophy of total quality management with its emphasis on reducing waste and increasing efficiency their objective is to improve their management of pollution and increase customer satisfaction this article investigates the factors that lead to total quality environmental management tqem by large firms we find that internal considerations stemming from a firm s technical capability size absolute and relative to competing firms extent of operations and volume of past emissions are strongly associated with the tqem adoption decision the first four factors are proxies for the firm s costs and capabilities of adopting tqem while the fifth factor is related to the benefits from increasing efficiency and waste reduction and thus proxies for internally generated demand for tqem the desire to improve a firm s image with customers earning good will with regulators and the anticipation of future regulations do not a

the simple economics of research portfolios this article identifies biases in market portfolios of parallel research projects arising from the noncongruence of social goals and private aspirations occasioned by those circumstances where the market rewards only the winner and where the winner is awarded the entire social surplus it is shown that under risk neutrality this noncongruence implies that t he market encourages the development of too many discoveries too lar ge a spread in the distribution of the quality of discoveries and an excessive occurrence of multiple discoveries copyright 1987 by royal economic society

cournot competition and green innovation an inverted u relationship we examine the relationship between competition and innovation in an industry where production is polluting and r d aims to reduce emissions green innovation we present an n firm oligopoly where firms compete in quantities and decide their investment in green r d when environmental taxation is exogenous aggregate r d investment always increases with the number of firms in the industry next we analyse the case where the emission tax is set endogenously by a regulator committed or time consistent with the aim to maximise social welfare we show that an inverted u relationship exists between aggregate r d and industry size under reasonable conditions and is driven by the presence of r d spillovers

determinants of innovation the study examines how firm size market structure profitability and growth influence innovative activity in small to medium sized australian manufacturing businesses using the recently released confidentialised unit record file drawn from the business longitudinal survey of the australian bureau of statistics regression analysis is conducted to determine the factors that effect subsequent innovative activity for the full sample of businesses as well as for sub samples of firms from high and low technological opportunity industries most variables including size r d intensity market structure and trade shares are found to be conducive to further innovative activity for the full sample and for high tech firms for low tech industries fewer variables are significant

financial incentive approaches for reducing peak electricity demand experience from pilot trials with a uk energy provider abstract whilst tariff based approaches to load shifting are common in the residential sector incentive based approaches are rare this is so even though providing customers incentives to shape their power consumption patterns has substantial potential this paper presents findings from an exploratory uk pilot study that trials financial payments and detailed energy feedback to incentivise load shifting of residential electricity consumption an intervention study was implemented measuring actual energy use by individual households as well as conducting surveys and interviews from the trials it was found that the approaches resulted in reductions in peak time energy use evidence from the study found that the incentives based approaches were able to overcome some of the barriers to response experienced in time of use studies though less good on others interestingly the height of the barriers varied by the electricity using practice and the incentivising approach applied the height of the barriers also varied by participant the study concludes by identifying that broad participation in demand response is likely to require a suite of incentivising approaches that appeal to different people a key policy finding of interest to international agencies government public and private sector entities

schumpeterian patterns of innovation using patent data for four countries germany france united kingdom and italy for the period 1968 1986 the authors find that the patterns of innovative activities differ systematically across technological classes while remarkable similarities emerge across countries in the patterns of innovative activities for each technological class this result strongly suggests that technological imperatives and technology specific factors closely linked to technological regimes play a major role in determining the patterns of innovative activities across countries schumpeter proposed two major patterns of innovative activities the first one labelled by nelson and winter 1982 and kamien and schwartz 1982 as schumpeter mark i is proposed in the theory of economic development 1934 in this work schumpeter examined the typical european industrial structure of the late nineteenth century characterised by many small firms according to this view the pattern of innovative activity is characterised by technological ease of entry in an industry and by a major role played by new firms in innovative activities new entrepreneurs come in an industry with new ideas new products or new processes launch new enterprises which challenge established firms and thus continuously disrupt the current ways of production organisation and distribution and wipe out the quasi rents associated with previous innovations the second one labelled schumpeter mark ii is proposed in capitalism socialism and democracy 1942 in this work inspired by the features of the american industry of the first half of the twentieth century schumpeter discussed the relevance of the industrial r d laboratory for technological innovation and the key role of large firms according to this view the pattern of innovative activities is characterised by the prevalence of large established firms and by relevant barriers to entry for new innovators large firms have institutionalised the innovation process with the creation of r d laboratories filled with researchers technicians and engineers with their accumulated stock of knowledge in specific technological areas their advanced competence in large scale r d projects production and distribution and their relevant financial resources they create barriers to entry to new entrepreneurs and small firms

meta regression analysis a quantitative method of literature surveys abstract pedagogically literature reviews are instrumental they summarize the large literature written on a particular topic give coherence to the complex often disparate views expressed about an issue and serve as a springboard for new ideas however literature surveys rarely establish anything approximating unanimous consensus ironically this is just as true for the empirical economic literature to harmonize this dissonance we offer a quantitative methodology for reviewing the empirical economic literature meta regression analysis mra is the regression analysis of regression analyses mra tends to objectify the review process it studies the processes that produce empirical economic results as though they were any other social scientific phenomenon mra provides a framework for replication and offers a sensitivity analysis for model specification in this brief essay we propose a new method of reviewing economic literature mra and discuss its potential

reducing household electricity demand through smart metering the role of improved information about energy saving abstract the international roll out of residential smart meters has increased considerably in recent years the improved consumption feedback provided and in particular the installation of in house displays has been shown to significantly reduce residential electricity demand in some international trials this paper attempts to uncover the underlying drivers of such information led reductions by exploring two research questions first does feedback improve a household s stock of information about potential energy reducing behaviours and second do improvements in such information help explain the demand reductions associated with the introduction of smart metering and time of use tariffs data is from a randomised controlled smart metering trial ireland which also collected extensive information on household attitudes towards energy conservation and self reported stocks of information related to energy saving as with previous results in ireland we find that participation in a smart metering programme with time of use tariffs significantly reduces demand although treated households also increased their self reported energy reducing information such improvements are not correlated with demand reductions in the short run given this result it is possible that feedback and other information provided in the context of smart metering are mainly effective in reducing and shifting demand because they act as a reminder and motivator

market versus corporate structure in plant level innovation performance this paper examines the effect which market and corporate structure have on the extent of innovation for a sample of circa 300 manufacturing plants located in scotland innovation is defined as the introduction of a commercially significant new product at the establishment level the theoretical model of geroski 1990 is extended to incorporate plant level variables such as size multiplant operation the presence of r d facilities and external indigenous ownership a distinction is made between the direct and indirect effects of these variables negative binomial estimations indicate that corporate structure influences are more important in determining the number of innovations than market structure and barrier to entry variables plant size foreign ownership and the presence of r d are all positively associated with innovation direct effects greatly outweigh indirect effects tobit estimations on the number of innovations per employee support the findings of acs and audretsch 1988 that smaller enterprises are more innovation intensive than larger enterprises at least up to a limit of around 1200 employees the positive effect of r d arises principally from increasing the probability of a plant becoming an innovator rather than from making a plant more innovation intensive by contrast the importance of size lies principally in encouraging further innovations among plants which are already innovators but less than proportionately with the increase in employment size

why do firms do basic research with their own money abstractthe question to be addressed is why do private firms perform basic research with their own money interest in this question derives from both analytical and utilitarian considerations there is empirical evidence in the united states which provides the main context for this paper supporting the view that basic research makes a significant contribution to the productivity growth of the economy 4 7 it is widely held that social returns from basic research are significant and higher than private returns and it is for this reason that most such activities continue to be financed by the taxpayer this also implies that measures aimed at increasing basic research by the private sector will be welfare improving in the united states the federal government in the years since the second world war has provided the vast majority of all funds devoted to basic research although the federal share has been declining in recent years and although that share is at its lowest level in about 20 years it still constitutes about two thirds of the total 10 this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

market structure and the allocation of r d expenditures abstract it is shown that as the number of firms increases firms tend to allocate higher budgets for development relative to basic research this is in contrast to the results found in aghion and howitt aghion p howitt p 1996 research and development in the growth process jounal of economic growth 1 49 73

introducing a demand based electricity distribution tariff in the residential sector demand response and customer perception increased demand response is essential to fully exploit the swedish power system which in turn is an absolute prerequisite for meeting political goals related to energy efficiency and climate chan

academic patent quality and quantity before and after the bayh dole act in the united states abstract this paper summarizes the results of empirical analyses of data on the characteristics of the pre and post 1980 patents of three leading us academic patenters the university of california stanford university and columbia university we complement the analysis of these institutions with an analysis of the characteristics of the patents issued to all us universities before and after 1980 our analysis suggests that the effects of the bayh dole act on the content of academic research and patenting at stanford and the university of california were modest the most significant change in the content of research at these universities one associated with increased patenting and licensing at both universities before and after 1980 was the rise of biomedical research and inventive activity but bayh dole had little to do with this growth both uc and stanford university administrators intensified their efforts to market faculty inventions in the wake of bayh dole this enlargement of the pool of marketed inventions appears to have reduced the commercial yield of this population at both universities but we find no decline in the importance or generality of the post 1980 patents of these two universities the analysis of overall us university patenting suggests that the patents issued to institutions that entered into patenting and licensing after the effective date of the bayh dole act are indeed less important and less general than the patents issued before and after 1980 to us universities with longer experience in patenting inexperienced academic patenters appear to have obtained patents that proved to be less significant in terms of the rate and breadth of their subsequent citations than those issuing to more experienced university patenters bayh dole s effects on entry therefore may be as important as any effects of the act on the internal research culture of us universities in explaining any decline in the importance and generality of us academic patents after 1980

prices information and nudges for residential electricity conservation a meta analysis incentivising households to lower their electricity consumption is increasingly used as a tool to create a more flexible electricity demand previous reviews estimate that electricity savings of 6 4 7 4 can be achieved through monetary informational and behavioural incentives this papers argues that a more realistic estimate is of a 1 9 3 9 reduction in consumption based on the most recent experimental data from both peer reviewed and grey literature sources using data from 52 studies published during the smart grid era 2005 onwards the effects of incentives from 128 observations amounting to 713 002 households are analysed the results show that individual and real time feedback as well as personalised advice on how to save electricity are more effective than feedback on electricity costs and general electricity savings tips which lead to relative increases in consumption despite improvements in the quality of more recent studies the analysis highlights the importance of methodological rigour in carrying out and reporting effects of incentives an absence of a control group of socio demographic data and the self selection of participants into treatment leads to overestimation of effects

effects of feedback on residential electricity demand findings from a field trial in austria abstract this paper analyzes the effects of providing feedback on electricity consumption in a field trial involving more than 1500 households in linz austria about half of these households received feedback together with information about electricity saving measures pilot group while the remaining households served as a control group participation in the pilot group was random but households were able to choose between two types of feedback access to a web portal or written feedback by post results from cross section ols regression suggest that feedback provided to the pilot group corresponds with electricity savings of around 4 5 for the average household our results from quantile regressions imply that for households in the 30th to the 70th percentile of electricity consumption feedback on electricity consumption is statistically significant and effects are highest in absolute terms and as a share of electricity consumption for percentiles below or above this range feedback appears to have no effect finally controlling for a potential endogeneity bias induced by non random participation in the feedback type groups we find no difference in the effects of feedback provided via the web portal and by post

the influences of financial and non financial factors on energy saving behaviour a field experiment in japan abstract this study examines the influences of financial and non financial factors on electricity conservation behaviour a random sample of 236 japanese households participated in the field experiment and the participants were offered two interventions such as monetary rewards depending on their reduction in electricity consumption and comparative feedback the average saving rates of the i reward intervention group 5 9 and the ii reward with comparative feedback group 8 2 are statistically larger than those of the iii control group 1 7 our study demonstrates the following first our econometric analysis confirmed a significant response by households to financial incentives but a more inconclusive response to the treatment that provided non financial additional information second we found a positive influence of treatment externalities across time and households on energy saving third there is a heterogeneous treatment effect in the reward intervention group with the households having a high new ecological paradigm nep score being more likely to respond to the reward programme and save electricity than those that do not finally and most interestingly differences in responses to the questionnaire before and after the experiment suggest that the participants had underestimated the marginal costs of saving electricity before they actually started to do so

innovation firm size and growth in a centralized organization the optimal innovation firm size and growth are derived for a centrally controlled firm in which only the entrepreneur evaluates and restores current projects or evaluates and adopts new projects current projects are subject to failure due to entry and possible obsolescence while new projects may not be successful the optimal allocation of attention implies bounds on firm size and that the rate of innovation depends not only on monopoly profits firm size and technological opportunity but also on the probability of obsolescence the effects of monopoly power and firm size on innovation also depend on the degree of obsolescence

science and the diffusion of knowledge abstract scientists social scientists and politicians frequently credit basic science with stimulating technological innovation and with it economic growth despite a substantial body of research investigating this general relationship relatively little empirical attention has been given to understanding the mechanisms that might generate this linkage this paper considers whether more rapid diffusion of knowledge brought about by the norm of publication might account for part of this effect we identify the importance of publication by comparing the patterns of citations from future patents to three groups of focal patents i those that reference scientific peer reviewed publications ii those that reference commercial non scientific publications and iii those that reference neither our analyses strongly implicate publication as an important mechanism for accelerating the rate of technological innovation patents that reference published material whether peer reviewed or not receive more citations primarily because their influence diffuses faster in time and space

an analysis of the composition of r d spending research and development encompasses a myriad of activities generally research is the primary search for technical or scientific advancement and development is the translation of such advancement into product of process innovations the national science foundation has fostered an even finer breakdown basic research applied research and development in practice however r d is more heterogeneous than these labels imply the research fields associated with basic research include areas in both the physical and biological sciences applied research and development projects relate to product groups as diverse as all the activities in the industrial sector nevertheless most previous empirical studies of the microeconomic aspects of r d have treated r d spending as a single homogeneous activity consequently a generally acceptable set of variables has developed for explaining inter firm levels of r d spending but virtually nothing is known about the determinants of the inter firm composition of r d

portfolio choice in research and development we analyze the effects of a winner take all patent mechanism on the riskiness of the research strategies chosen by competingfirms as well as on thefirms incentives to duplicate research projects nash equilibrium choices are compared with the social optimum in a oneshot simultaneous move game in which competitors choose the riskiness or correlation of their research performances we show that neither society nor firms have any preference for correlation per se while the divergence between social and privately optimal levels of risk depends on skewness characteristics of the probability distribution over discovery dates and on levels of risk aversion

a penny for your quotes patent citations and the value of innovations the use ofpatents in economic research has been seriously hindered by the fact that patents vary enormously in their importance or value and hence simple patent counts cannot be informative about innovative output the purpose of this article is to put forward patent counts weighted by citations as indicators of the value of innovations thereby overcoming the limitations of simple counts the empirical analysis of a particular innovation computed tomography scanners indeed shows a close association between citation based patent indices and independent measures of the social value of innovations in that field moreover the weighting scheme appears to be nonlinear increasing in the number of citations implying that the informational content of citations rises at the margin as in previous studies simple patent counts are found to be highly correlated with contemporaneous rd however here the association is within afield over time rather than cross sectional

proactive r d management and firm growth a punctuated equilibrium model the external environment is characterized by periods of relative stability interspersed with periods of extreme change implying that high performing firms must practice exploration and exploitation in order to survive and thrive in this paper we posit that r d expenditure volatility indicates the presence of proactive r d management and is evidence of a firm moving from exploitation to exploration over time this is consistent with a punctuated equilibrium model of r d investment where shocks are induced by reactions to external turbulence using an unbalanced panel of almost 11 000 firm years from 1997 to 2006 we show that greater fluctuations in the firm s r d expenditure over time are associated with higher firm growth developing a contextual view of the relationship between r d expenditure volatility and firm growth we find that this relationship is weaker among firms with higher levels of corporate diversification and negative among smaller firms and those in slow clockspeed industries

why are governmental r d and private r d complements it is well known that government r d and private r d have a complementary relationship however no previous study has provided an explanation for why that complementary relationship exists this paper argues that infratechnology is the critical link between governmental and private r d and that the observed complementarity is the result of technical complementarity at the production level between funding infratechnology and knowledge sharing a theoritical framework based on this argument is developed and examined empirically for supporting evidence evidence of technical complementary is found as well as evidence that governmental r d stimulates the sharing of knowledge

r d portfolio and market structure this article analyses how firms allocate their resources when they compete for multiple patents in heterogeneous research projects simultaneously a simple model shows that firms resource allocation is biased away from risky and basic research even when imitation is not possible and firms are fully rational therefore a market may lack major innovations despite large aggregate research expenditure and strong patent protection this article also shows that as a market becomes more competitive firms invest relatively less in basic research but more in risky research these results provide a novel explanation for an ambiguous empirical relationship between innovation and market concentration

bias in market r d portfolios abstract based on a simple contest model of product innovation we find that in accordance with conventional wisdom and contrary to much of the previous theoretical literature market competition implies an equilibrium level of risk which is too low from society s standpoint the intuition is that the divergence between private and social marginal benefits from rd and this probability is higher for lower risk projects

what motivates common pool resource users experimental evidence from the field this paper develops and tests several models of pure nash strategies of individuals who extract from a common pool resource when they are motivated by a combination of self interest and other motivations such as altruism reciprocity inequity aversion and conformism we test whether an econometric summary of subjects strategies is consistent with one of these motivations using data from a series of common pool resource experiments conducted in three regions of colombia as expected average extraction levels are less than that predicted by a model of pure self interest but are nevertheless sub optimal moreover we find that a model of conformism with monotonically increasing best response functions best describes average strategies our empirical results are inconsistent with models of altruism reciprocity and inequity aversion

r d determinants accounting for the differences between research and development the determinants of r d are an important topic of innovation studies the classical schumpeterian hypotheses about the influence of size and market power have been complemented with the role played by industry determinants such as demand pull technological opportunity and appropriability in determining r d investments however r d has always been considered as a whole even though research and development activities differ in many aspects we take advantage of a new panel database of innovative spanish firms pitec to distinguish between research and development efforts of firms we analyze the differentiated role played by traditional r d determinants in driving research and development results show that demand pull and appropriability have a higher effect on development while technological opportunity is more influential for research differences are statistically significant important in magnitude and robust to the use of different indicators for demand pull technological opportunity and appropriability and to several robustness checks

schumpeterian patterns of innovation are technology specific this paper examines the patterns of innovative activities at the technological and country levels using patent data for 49 technological classes in six countries usa japan germany france united kingdom and italy it is shown that the patterns of innovative activities differ systematically across technological classes but are remarkably similar across countries for each technological class in particular two groups of technological classes are identified schumpeter mark i and schumpeter mark ii in these two groups innovative activities are structured and organized in different ways the first represents a widening pattern concentration of innovative activities is low innovators are of small economic size stability in the ranking of innovators is low and entry of new innovators is high the second represents a deepening pattern concentration of innovative activities is higher than in the first group innovators are of larger economic size stability in the ranking of innovators is greater and entry is lower the former group comprises mechanical technologies and traditional sectors while the latter includes chemicals and electronics this result suggests that technology related factors such as technological regimes defined in terms of conditions of opportunity appropriability cumulativeness and properties of the knowledge base play a major role in determining the specific pattern of innovative activities of a technological class across countries within these constraints country specific factors introduce differences across countries in the pattern of innovative activities for a specific technological class finally the relationships between the specific features of the patterns of innovative activities and international technological specialization are examined technological advantages appear in general to be linked to higher degrees of asymmetries among innovators higher stability of the ranking of innovators smaller economic size of the innovating firms and lower entry rates of new innovators these relationships however are different in the two groups of technological classes in schumpeter mark i widening technological classes international technological specialization is associated with relatively higher degrees of asymmetries among innovators and entry of new innovators as well as smaller firm size while in schumpeter ii deepening technological classes international technological specialization is linked to the existence of a stable but competitive core of persistent innovators

measuring patent s influence on technological evolution a study of knowledge spanning and subsequent inventive activity we introduce technological influence as a variable to measure an invention s direct and indirect impact on the evolution of technology this provides a novel means to study the short and long run effect of invention antecedents on technological evolution invention activity and economic growth a comparison between models of technological influence and direct technological impact is presented model estimations are based on data from semiconductor patents granted over a 5 year period results from quantile regression estimations show significant differences in the relationships between antecedents of technological influence and impact for example pioneering the spanning of knowledge boundaries has a positive relationship with the patent s influence while no relationship is found with direct citations these results have important implications for public policy and the management of technology they suggest the need for deeper understanding of the micro foundations of the technological evolution process and raise the question of whether inventors under current ip protection receive adequate economic incentives to promote actions driving economic growth

energy conservation nudges and environmentalist ideology evidence from a randomized residential electricity field experiment nudges are being widely promoted to encourage energy conservation we show that while the electricity conservation nudge of providing feedback to households on own and peers home electricity usage works with liberals it can backfire with conservatives our regression estimates predict that a democratic household that pays for electricity from renewable sources that donates to environmental groups and that lives in a liberal neighborhood reduces its consumption by 3 percent in response to this nudge a republican household that does not pay for electricity from renewable sources and that does not donate to environmental groups increases its consumption by 1 percent

the international economics of intellectual property right protection a welfare theoretic trade policy analysis abstract this paper provides an analytical construct for examining the trade policy effects of greater intellectual property protection in technology importing countries it is shown that two types of conflict are likely to arise between net technology importers and exporters the first relates to the level of protection with importers preferring a low level and exporters a high one the second conflict hitherto unexplored relates to the manner of protection with importers likely to prefer discriminatory regimes favoring local r d creation whereas exporters would prefer nondiscriminatory protection in importing countries

schumpeterian competition in experimental markets abstract we report on a series of laboratory experiments that capture key elements of research and development r d rivalry the experimental environment has a small number of sellers who compete in terms of pricing and production decisions and in terms of cost reducing r d rewards for innovation depend on the profitability of product market competition the experiments capture a kind of dynamic schumpeterian competition there is a sharp contrast in experimental results between monopolies and four seller competitive markets aggregate r d is higher under competition than under monopoly and prices follow marginal cost reductions much more quickly under competition than under monopoly the paper examines market performance in the experiments and the sources of market performance problems

time series minimum wage studies a meta analysis time series minimum wage studies a meta analysis author s david card and alan b krueger reviewed work s source the american economic review vol 85 no 2 papers and proceedings of the hundredth and seventh annual meeting of the american economic association washington dc january 6 8 1995 may 1995 pp 238 243 published by american economic association stable url http www jstor org stable 2117925 accessed 04 11 2011 15 46

patent quality and research productivity measuring innovation with multiple indicators we analyse the determinants of the decline in research productivity using panel data on manufacturing firms in the us for the period 1980 93 we focus on three factors the level of demand the quality of patents and technological exhaustion we develop an index of patent quality using detailed patent information and show that using multiple indicators substantially reduces the measured variance in quality research productivity at the firm level is inversely related to patent quality and the level of demand as predicted by theory and patent quality is positively associated with the stock market value of firms

scientific linkages and firm productivity panel data evidence from taiwanese electronics firms using a panel of electronics firms listed on the taiwan stock exchange this paper explores the spillover of scientific research to the private sector by looking at the impact of the intensity a patent s backward citation of scientific publications relative to citation of other patents on the patent owning firm s productivity to identify the causal effect we use measures of a firm s financial constraints as instrumental variables to account for the potential endogeneity of scientific citation intensity of a patent the empirical results suggest that the citation of scientific publications by a patent has a strong and positive effect on the patent owning firm s productivity

is the market biased against risky r d this article analyzes the riskiness of the r d strategies chosen by firms engaged in a winner takes all patent race in contradiction to dasgupta and stiglitz 1980 we show that when the distribution of invention times is symmetric the market equilibrium cannot be safer and may be riskier than is socially optimal we identify the economic reason for the emergence but only if there are few competitors