Veranstaltungen

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, Raum E10

Prof. Sapna Kumar ist Juraprofessorin in den USA und derzeit Gastwissenschaftlerin in der Abteilung Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research.

Moderation: Pedro Dias Batista

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313

Innovation is a driver of many widely desired market outcomes, including higher quality, lower costs, more choices, greater efficiency and economic growth. Meanwhile, competition law is supposed to safeguard and foster competition in those markets. It therefore should play an important role in shaping incentives to innovate. Analyses of the effect of competition law on innovation, however, are scarce and suffer from two limitations. Theoretically, existing work—mostly in the law-and-economics tradition—tends to ignore the political and policy context of competition law. Empirically, existing analyses are almost all based on U.S. data—and they yield mixed results. This paper examines the relationship between competition law and innovation (as measured by patent filings) in its political context, and it does so in cross-sectional and panel analyses for a large number of jurisdictions. We find that competition law indeed has a strongly statistically significant and positive effect on the rate of innovation cross-nationally and over time—but only in the context high levels of state capacity and judicial independence.

Ansprechpartner: Felix Poege

2. Jahreskonferenz zu diesen Kernthemen: Verwertungsgesellschaften, geographische Herkunftsangaben und Technologietransfer
 

Mit  seiner Initiative „Smart IP for Latin America“ fördert das Institut die Forschung zu Fragen des Immaterialgüterrechts in Lateinamerika in Zusammenarbeit mit akademischen und öffentlichen Einrichtungen vor Ort. Im Zentrum stehen dabei rechtliche und wirtschaftliche Fragen um die Bedeutung und Auswirkung unterschiedlicher Schutzstandards in dieser Region sowie der Einfluss entsprechender Regulierungen auf die Dynamik des Wettbewerbs. Bei der diesjährigen Jahreskonferenz, die zusammen mit der Universidad de los Andes veranstaltet wird, stehen vor allem rechtliche Rahmenbedingungen für Verwertungsgesellschaften, geographische Herkunftsangaben und Fragen des Technologietransfers auf der Agenda.

Ansprechpartner: Matthias Lamping

 

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313
 

Given the relevance that governments and public bodies give to the patent system, there is surprisingly little evidence on the actual role played by patent rights in stimulating knowledge diffusion and the generation of follow-on innovations. The main objective of the present paper is to provide new, robust evidence on this research topic. To this aim, we take advantage of a body of United States federal law enacted in 1951 with the objective of preventing disclosure of new inventions that may represent a threat to the national security. Estimation results show a negative and statistically significant relationship between the enforcement of a secrecy order and knowledge diffusion, thus supporting the idea that the patent system is conducive to technology diffusion (joint work with Laurent Bergé and Thorsten Doherr).

Ansprechpartner: Rainer Widmann, Ph.D.

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313

Decision-support systems can influence people in various domains of life. Firms have started implementing these systems via chatbots and other natural language-based assistants. While benefiting from these services, individuals provide sensitive and valuable data to the private industry. Using this data, companies may generate additional profits. Moreover, by making their data available, individuals may also promote the common good. Policymakers should provide efficient tools to let the public collectively benefit from their data. This paper provides first insights on how people may voluntarily provide data to a decision-support system in order to contribute to a social good. In particular, we have designed three online studies to test (1) whether providing personal data to a decision-support system for a common good is a social dilemma, (2) how the willingness to voluntarily provide data is subject to the risk of data getting leaked, the effectiveness of data provision, the developing party and the human-supervision of the underlying algorithm and (3) how differences in cognitive moral judgment (reason-based/ emotion-based) and the perceived moral obligation to provide data for a common good effect the willingness to make data available. In all studies, we compare two social goods: a sustainable environment and a sustainable health system.

Ansprechpartner: Dr. Michael Rose

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313
 

The FDA maintains post-approval safety surveillance programs to monitor the safety of drugs. As adverse events are reported, they may choose to intervene and change the safety labeling associated with a drug. How do markets respond to these regulatory changes? We provide causal evidence that these regulatory interventions have a negative impact on aggregate demand for pharmaceuticals. We find that aggregate demand declines by 16.9 percent within two years of a relabeling event. After accounting for all plausible substitution patterns by physicians along with competitor actions, aggregate demand declines by 4.7 percent. Critically, this decline represents consumers that leave the market. The overall effect appears to be driven by ‘high-intensity’ markets or those with significant relabeling activity. Results control for the level of advertising and are robust to variation across types of relabeling, market sizes, and levels of competition. Implications for upstream innovation and public policy are highlighted (joint work with Xin Yan and Chirantan Chatterjee).

Ansprechpartner: Michael Rose, Ph.D.

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, Raum E10

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, Raum E10

Blockchain technology promises to deliver on the ideal of decentralization but faces the challenge of being compatible with existing legal systems so as to facilitate wider adoption. In the copyright domain, different elements may be represented by cryptographic tokens: works, ownership metadata, licensing terms and remuneration. This presentation will examine the impact of blockchain technology on copyright law like the differences between the new, smart-contract-based private ordering regime and the fundamental components of copyright law, such as exceptions and limitations or the doctrine of exhaustion. It will dig deeper into the real-word application of different blockchain solutions for copyright-protected content, namely in the online music sector.
 

Dr. João Pedro Quintais, LL.M is a qualified lawyer in Portugal and postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Information Law (IViR), University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on information law matters, including intermediary liability, intellectual property and the application of copyright in the online environment. He is a member of the Blockchain & Society Policy Research Lab and Managing Editor of the Kluwer Copyright Blog.

Kontakt: Michèle Finck, Valentina Moscon

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313

While economic theories (e.g. Hicks (1932); Acemoglu (2010)) suggest substitutability between labor and automation innovation, the relationship between labor supply and investments into automation innovation has so far escaped empirical examination. We analyze the local impact of changes in labor factor endowments on innovative activities by exploiting a placement policy that led to exogeneous inflows of immigrants during the 1990s and 2000s in Germany. Our results indicate that these positive shocks of low-skilled labor supply were followed by an absolute as well as relative decline in automation innovation. This pattern is consistent with the substitutability hypothesis on labor and labor-saving innovation. Subgroup analyses reveal effect heterogeneity by pre-existing labor market tightness. We further show that these inflows did not impact the level of non-automation innovation.

Ansprechpartner: Michael Rose

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum E10

Hasty Buyers? Target Age in Times of Technology Hype

Referenten: Tobias Hlavka und Joachim Henkel (beide TU München)

Choking Under Pressure - The Effect of Asymmetric Contests on Stress and Performance

Referent: Jonas Heite (Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb)