The excellent Kevin A. Bryan on innovation

He has a forthcoming JET paper with Jorge Lemus, here is the abstract:

We construct a tractable general model of the direction of innovation. Competition leads firms to pursue inefficient research lines, because firms both race toward easy projects and do not fully appropriate the value of their inventions. This dual distortion will imply that any directionally efficient policy must condition on the properties of hypothetical inventions which are not discovered in equilibrium, hence common R&D policies like patents and prizes generate suboptimal innovation direction and may even generate lower welfare than laissez faire. We apply this theory to radical versus incremental innovation, patent pools, and the effect of trade on R&D.

Here is a slightly different version of the abstract, along with other research papers.  Here is Kevin on travel.  Kevin is at the University of Toronto, and also is author of the excellent blog A Fine Theorem.

Here is Kevin’s reading list on innovation, recommended.

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