Events

On 19/20 December 2022, the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition will host the 5^th Research on Innovation, Science and Entrepreneurship Workshop, an annual workshop for Ph.D. students and Junior Post-docs in Economics and Management. 

The goal of the RISE5 Workshop is to stimulate an in-depth discussion of a select number of empirical research papers. It offers Ph.D. students and Junior Post-docs an opportunity to present their work and to receive feedback.

Keynote speaker of the RISE5 Workshop is Robert Seamans (NYU Stern).

See the full Program.

For more information see RISE Workshop.

Programme

12/15/2022
 

09:00 a.m.
Opening Remarks: Intro to the MPI project

11:00 a.m.
Panel 1: The role of the SDGs and data sharing to better address climate change

02:00 p.m.
Panel 2: The current data-related legal framework to tackle climate change: what is there and what is missing

04:15 p.m.
Panel 3: Producing from the land: data-related business and technologies to tackle climate change

12/16/2022
 

09:00 a.m.
Panel 4: Consumption in the city: data-related initiatives to foster a sustainable consumption culture

11:15 a.m.
Panel 5: Data-based initiatives to fight climate change: going beyond the market

02:00 p.m.
Closing Remarks

The data economy offers great potential for emerging economies to achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs). However, data-sharing policies must be properly framed to leverage this potential. This is the starting premise of the international research project led by the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, in collaboration with international partners, called "Data Sharing in Emerging Economies". The project aims to define a holistic normative regulatory theory on promoting data sharing that will help to fulfil SDGs. Furthermore, it aims to develop specific policies for data sharing in emerging economies and, ultimately, provide assistance for possible legal reforms. The partners taking part in the project are Université Virtuelle du Sénégal, BML Munjal University of India, and Mackenzie University of Brazil.

For Brazil, the project’s main focus is on Climate Action (SDG 13) due to its relevance for the country and the world, the limited progress in environmental goals reported so far, and the great potential to advance in this area by fostering the data economy. Given the scope of the topic, the project is narrowed down to address environmental issues from a territorial perspective, taking into account the interrelation between agricultural production, transportation processes, and product consumption in cities. This opens up questions on how agribusiness and (city) consumption impact climate change, a matter related to economic growth (SDG 8) and responsible consumption and production (SDG 12). It also raises questions about the impact of climate change on rural and urban life, which connects to issues of deforestation and life on land (SDG 15), and how to promote sustainable and clean cities (SDG 11). All of these are relevant topics on the Brazilian policy agenda.

In its first stage, the project will be focused on the Amazon and São Paulo regions, each with its own rural/urban dynamics, but also interconnected along the national agribusiness product value chain. As evidence shows, agribusiness is one of Brazil’s main economic sectors, accounting for about 21% of GDP in 2018. It is also one of the sectors with the greatest potential to reduce greenhouse gases (GHG). A major source of pollution is beef herds, whose exploitation also relates to illegal deforestation actions. As noted by the OECD, while combating illegal deforestation is a priority, digital technologies based on big data and machine learning are also key to increasing farming efficiency and thus contributing to climate action. Finding more evidence on how data-sharing initiatives can promote green production and growth, as well as what the policy and technical challenges are to making this happen, are concrete goals of the project.

So is identifying the extent to which data-sharing initiatives may help to foster a greener consumption culture. Evidence shows that cities are responsible for rapid GHG effects. How products are transported to urban areas, what the consumption habits of individuals are, and how waste is disposed of and/or reused, are key questions related to goods’ life cycle and their environmental impact. The project aims to explore data-related initiatives with the potential to mitigate the impact of consumption and waste in São Paulo. So far, indicators and programs related to climate action exist, as well as some initiatives, like platforms for agriculture product traceability that can improve the consumer decision-making process and tax collection. The project aims to identify further data-related initiatives —market and non-market based—  that can benefit from data sharing, such as platforms to collate data on food loss, waste, and surplus, or data sharing for the process of waste-separate collection.

This exploratory research will take the form of a workshop with stakeholders from academia, the public sector, civil society, and industry. It will be held on 15-16 December 2022, at the premises of the Mackenzie University in São Paulo. Stakeholders are kindly invited to contribute by providing insights regarding: (1) business models used and market realities; (2) existing legal and technical impediments to data sharing; and/or (3) the role they foresee of policy- and lawmakers for any future policy or legislative action.

We study belief updating about relative performance in an ego-relevant task. Manipulating the perceived ego relevance of the task, we show that subjects update their beliefs optimistically because they derive direct utility flows from holding positive beliefs. This finding provides a behavioral explanation why and how overconfidence can evolve in the presence of objective information. Moreover, we document that subjects, who received more bad signals, downplay the ego-relevance of the task. Taken together, these findings suggest that subjects use two alternative strategies to protect their ego when presented with objective information.

Contact person: Marina Chugunova

Subscription to the invitation mailing list and more information on the seminar page.

The Perks of Being Unknown: Implied Costs of Knowledge Seeking on Organizational Platforms

Presenter: Maren Mickeler (ISTO)

Discussant: Carolin Formella (Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition)

Everyone Likes to Be Liked: Experimental Evidence from Matching Markets

Presenter: Timm Opitz (Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition)

Discussant: Gresa Latifi (TUM)

This paper analyzes the contribution of entrepreneurial activities to gender earnings gaps among university faculty. Administrative data from universities (UMETRICS) linked to the universe of confidential W2 and 1099 tax records allow me to precisely classify earnings sources and measure faculty commercial engagement. I find substantial faculty gender gaps. Female faculty are 20 percentage points less likely to engage in entrepreneurial activities, with the entire participation gap driven by the gap in self-employment. The raw total male-female faculty earnings gap is $63k (on a base of $162k), with the gap in non-university earnings accounting for $18k (29%). Thus, though university earnings account for most of the total gap, commercial engagement opportunities substantially expand the gap. Earnings gaps also exist for all components of non-university earnings, including earnings from self-employment as well as from incumbent, young/startup, high-tech, and low-tech firms. Quantile regressions show that, as faculty move up the earnings distribution, gender earnings gaps grow and entrepreneurial activity becomes a more important contributor to the total gap, which is suggestive of a “glass ceiling” effect for female faculty. I also find that earnings gaps are small at career outset and then grow over time, but that the contribution of entrepreneurial activities to the total gap is relatively constant over the lifecycle.

Contact person: Michael Rose

Subscription to the invitation mailing list and more information on the seminar page.

Co-organised with

• Scientific and Research Institute of Intellectual Property of the National Academy of Law Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine)
• Institute of Law of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Kyiv, Ukraine)
• CO ‘100 % of Life’ (Kyiv, Ukraine)

Objective

To identify potential solutions under intellectual property (IP) law for alleviating the public health crisis in Ukraine through the exchange with international legal scholars. 

Internationale Experten/Podiumsteilnehmende

• Matthias Leistner, Professor, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Germany
• Geertrui Van Overwalle, Professor, KU Leuven, Belgium
• Henning Grosse Ruse-Khan, Professor, University of Cambridge, UK
• Mohammed El Said, Professor, University of Central Lancashire, UK
• Peter K. Yu, Regents Professor of Law and Communication, Texas A&M University, USA
• Erika Dueñas Loayza, World Health Organization, Access to Medicines and Health Products Division (tbc)

Discussion moderation: Dr Oksana Kashyntseva, Dr Daria Kim

Women are underrepresented in patenting and the gap is not closing quickly. One major roadblock is the dearth of causal evidence on the potential effectiveness of interventional policies to address the gender patenting gap. Using a randomized control trial (RCT) at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), we identify the heterogeneous causal impacts across gender and technologies of increased patent examination assistance on the probability of obtaining patent rights. Women applicants were about 11 percentage points more likely than men to benefit from this assistance, and the benefits were largest for U.S. inventors, new U.S. inventors, and in technology areas where women had the worst relative outcomes. Our results suggest that a portion of the gender patenting gap could be eliminated through the provision of additional resources and assistance during patent prosecution.

Authors of the paper: Nicholas Pairolero, Andrew Toole, Peter-Anthony Pappas, Charles deGrazia, Mike Teodorescu

Contact person: Svenja Friess

Since the United States Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Mayo vs. Prometheus, the United States has arrived at a regime where scientific discoveries are patentable only to the extent that a claim represents an ‘inventive application’ of the underlying principle. Under this regime, not only have medical diagnostics become nearly unpatentable, but the doctrine of patent eligibility has begun to supplant the requirements of disclosure and non-obviousness as well. This work shows that the Mayo regime relies on a particular set of premises, both stated and unstated: an ontological premise about ‘laws of nature’; a historical premise about the treatment of discoveries in 19th-century Anglo-American patent law; a jurisprudential premise about legislative intent in the U.S. patent statutes; a doctrinal premise about the relationship of patent-eligibility to other patentability doctrines; and an economic premise about the basic research and the effect of patents on fundamental principles on innovation. I examine these premises, particularly the historical and economic ones, and show that most, if not all, are unfounded.  These findings have significant implications for current legislative efforts in the United States to reform the doctrine of patent eligibility.

Contact person: Marina Chugunova

Active markets for intellectual property (IP) are desirable because they facilitate the reallocation of new inventions to those who can best commercialize them. Therefore, active IP markets provide an incentive for inventors and specialized startups to invent in the first place, which promotes economic growth. However, IP markets are thought to be relatively inefficient. They are mostly decentralized and opaque markets, with substantial search frictions. Although non-practicing entities (NPEs) play an intermediary role to reduce such frictions, their operations are costly and their net effect on innovation and the IP market’s efficiency is unclear. Against this background, I structurally estimate a search-and-bargaining model of the brokered patent market. The model suggests that, compared to the Walrasian benchmark, the brokered patent market is relatively inefficient and NPEs’ net effect on patent market efficiency is negative.

Contact person: David Heller