Events

The Max Planck Institute Post-Doc Conference 2016 seeks to advance the discussion on the challenges and future approaches of the law relating to personal data, in particular as regards competition law (including unfair competition law), consumer protection and general civil law as well as IP law. It provides young scholars (professors, assistant professors, lecturers and advanced PhD students) with an opportunity to present, discuss and publish their research.

Event Programme Post-Doc Conference 2016

Abstract:

Though fundamental to innovation and essential to many industries and occupations, the creative act has received limited attention as an economic behavior and has historically proven difficult to study. This paper studies the incentive effects of competition on individuals' creative production. Using a sample of commercial logo design competitions, and a novel, content-based measure of originality, I find that intensifying competition induces agents to explore novel, untested ideas over tweaking their earlier work, but heavy competition drives them to stop investing altogether. The results yield lessons for the management of creative workers and for the implementation of competitive procurement mechanisms for innovation.

Abstract:
We present preliminary results from a survey of 7,611 academic researchers across multiple fields in the US, Germany and Switzerland. The survey covers pre-publication sharing of research results, competition, norms of science, commercial orientation and size of research group. Results are presented across two related topics. Part I: We report the extent to which researchers report public (general) sharing of results prior to publication, and at what stage they share. Depending on their willingness to generally share and their propensity to withhold crucial parts respondents are divided into three types: sharers, ambivalent sharers and non-sharers. These are, respectively, 23.9%, 38.9%, and 37.2% of respondents. We estimate a probability model to examine the extent to which a belief that the norms of science hold in one’s area, competition and commercial orientation explain these field differences.

Part II: Recent research has considered the effect of team size on research productivity (citations, publications and patents). That work has typically focused on a single measure of team size (e.g., number of coauthors) and has failed to account for the endogeneity that exists between measures of research productivity and team size. We measure team size by number of coauthors, number in one’s research group, and number of groups worldwide in which there are collaborators. All three team size measures are found to be endogenous and instrumental variables estimation is used.

• Introduction to Crowd Innovation Lab at Harvard, the Lab with a mission to study the contests, the crowds, and to use the crowds to crack challenges for NASA and Academia

• The insights on crowdsourcing - advantages, trade-offs and niches

• Algorithm and Data Science challenges as a sweet-spot of crowdsourcing - examples, results and stories

Dr. Rinat Sergeev is Senior Data Scientist & Chief Scientific Advisor at the Crowd Innovation Lab/NASA Tournament Lab at Harvard University. Rinat works as a head of data science team, and a lead science and technical expert on exploring and utilizing crowdsourcing approaches in application to the data science and algorithmic challenges, coming from NASA, Business, or Academia. Rinat received his PhD in Quantum Mechanics in Ioffe Institute, Saint Petersburg. His research interests include conceptual analysis, analytical approaches and models in multiple areas.

Abstract:
This natural field experiment tests the effects of purely symbolic awards on volunteer retention in a public goods context. The experiment is conducted at Wikipedia, which faces declining editor retention rates, particularly among newcomers. Randomization assures that award receipt is orthogonal to previous performance. The analysis reveals that awards have a sizeable effect on newcomer retention, which persists over the four quarters following the initial intervention. This is noteworthy for indicating that awards for volunteers can be effective even if they have no impact on the volunteers’ future career opportunities. The awards are purely symbolic, and the status increment they produce is limited to the recipients’ pseudonymous online identities in a community they have just recently joined. The results can be explained by enhanced self-identification with the community, but they are also in line with recent findings on the role of status and reputation, recognition, and evaluation potential in online communities.

Am Dienstag, 20. September 2016, 19:00 Uhr, wird in Saal E10 des Max-Planck-Instituts Thomas Kramler von der Europäischen Kommission, Leiter der Sektoruntersuchung e-commerce, zu den Zwischenergebnissen der Sektoruntersuchung vortragen.

Vorab wird in der Aktuellen Viertelstunde Dr. Ingo Brinker, LL.M. (Chicago) von Gleiss Lutz Rechtsanwälte über aktuelle fusionskontrollrechtliche Fragen (insbesondere Staatsunternehmen und Prioritätsprinzip) sprechen, die sich anlässlich der Neuordnung in der Saatgutbranche ergeben haben (ChemChina/Syngenta; Dow/Dupont; Bayer/Monsanto).

Wir bitten um Anmeldung bis zum 16. September 2016 bei delia.zirilli(at)ip.mpg.de.

Wir freuen uns auf interessante Diskussionen und Begegnungen.

Abstract:

This paper examines patent oppositions as firm-level responses to newly-granted patents. We present a citation-based construct for measuring the technological lineage to which a newly granted patent lays claims. This network-analytic construct, which we label technology trees, allows us to develop a refined explanation of patent oppositions by taking into account the ownership structures of the technology to which a particular patent relates. An application to the cosmetics industry reveals that the technology tree measure, which is calculated on the level of individual patents, usefully complements established network measures at the industry level, such as triplet counts for measuring patent thickets. This suggests a need for further and more fine grained analyses of technology trees as context in which patent oppositions play out.