Events

Reported numbers of observed scientific misconduct, e.g. through retracted articles, are increasing at an alarming rate. The detected cases, however, only present the tip of the iceberg because the actual amount of scientific misconduct is impossible to observe. Fraud in science is professionally and socially unaccepted and leads to sanctions for the culpable scientists so that misconducting scientists try to hide their fraudulent actions. This means that ultimately, the size of the population of misconducting authors remains elusive and, as such, presents a “dark number.”
We estimate the size of the population of misconducting authors in medical and health sciences, drawing on capture-recapture methods. We find that the population size of misconducting authors in medical and health sciences is about 4,000 and therewith much larger than the cases that are detected. This finding calls for more transparency through data sharing among peers and author responsibility assignment. (joint with Maikel Pellens)

Contact person: Rainer Widmann

We investigate the impact of misconduct on the financing and exit opportunities of entrepreneurial ventures that are technologically related to the misconduct perpetrators. To do so, we consider all reported misconduct cases affecting US startups during 1998-2020 and estimate differences-in-differences models saturated with fixed effects. We show that startups producing similar technologies as the misconduct perpetrators become less likely to obtain financing and raise smaller amounts after the misconduct event is reported in the news, relative to startups developing dissimilar technologies located outside the perpetrators state. The strongest negative effects of misconduct are found to be associated with technological misconduct and sexual harassment, followed by financial fraud, while misconducts related to intellectual property infringements have statistically insignificant impact. Startups related to misconduct perpetrators are no less likely to be acquired than unrelated startups.

Contact person: Daehyun Kim

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

Startup Role in Post-war Rebuilding of the Ukrainian Economy (Iuliia Gernego, Kyiv National Economic University)
Innovative Entrepreneurship in Turbulent Times of War in Ukraine (Tetiana Shkoda, Kyiv National Economic University)

This paper shows that gender inequality affects the extent to which scientific ideas are used to develop new technologies. Despite strong incentives to select the most promising ideas, we claim that inventors are more likely to build on men’s rather than women’s science. We exploit the occurrence of simultaneous discoveries – i.e., instances when a man and a woman publish the same idea around the same time – and track the citations that those papers receive in patented inventions. The papers led by female scientists receive on average 40% fewer patent citations than their male-led twin. We examine several explanations for this gender gap in inventors’ attention. The pattern of results is consistent with inventors’ value expectations being a driver of the attention gap, beyond differences in the salience, overall productivity, and academic impact of scientists’ research. These findings have implications for our understanding of frictions in science-based technology development, as well as for broader theories of how gender inequality shapes cumulative innovation.

Contact person: Michael Rose

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

The Unified Patent Court (UPC) is now a reality in Europe. The new system for patent dispute resolution is the most significant change in the European patent landscape in decades. The court has been open since 1 June this year and is starting to hand down its first decisions. The UPC has a local division in Helsinki and a Nordic-Baltic regional division with its seat in Stockholm. Vilhelm Schröder is an experienced patent litigator from Finland and will provide insight on how the UPC is perceived particularly from a Nordic perspective.
 

This study examines when and how engineers who connect to brokers who span structural holes in communication networks can improve innovative performance at their firm. Using survey data on social networks at a large B2B software company, we find that engineers who pay attention to information from brokers achieve higher innovative performance than those who pay little (or no) attention to such information. Moreover, we find that the advantage of paying attention to brokers’ information is magnified when focal engineers are embedded in highly constrained networks. Yet, our post-hoc analysis reveals that engineers normally allocate less attention to information from brokers than that from local colleagues partially because brokers’ information is perceived to be less relevant to the engineers. These findings about the crucial role of attention allocation for secondhand brokers make contributions to studies of social networks and innovation.

Contact person: Marina Chugunova

In this research, we investigate where (in which neighborhood) newly arrived immigrants find their first job as a function of co-ethnic commuters. Using detailed employer- employee matched data, we are able to isolate ethnic peers from overall commuter flows. We argue that ethnic peers can provide better information about jobs in their workplace location than in other parts of the city. Exploiting this (information) heterogeneity in a conditional logit model allows us to control for individual-level and neighborhood- level heterogeneity. Our analysis provides causal evidence of positive effects of ethnic networks on labor market integration by reducing information frictions.

Contact person: Anastasiia Lutsenko

Language of the event is German.

Die Haftung von im Ausland ansässigen Zulieferern, deren Abnehmer die ins Ausland gelieferte Ware im Inland anbietet oder in Verkehr bringt, hat den Bundesgerichtshof in den vergangenen Jahren mehrfach beschäftigt. In der Entscheidung „Abdichtsystem“ ging es vor allem um die Grundlagen einer solchen Haftung. In der Entscheidung „Ultraschallsensor“ stand die Reichweite eines aus einer konkreten Beteiligungshandlung resultierenden Unterlassungsanspruchs im Mittelpunkt. Der Vortrag zeigt die wesentlichen Grundlinien auf, die den beiden Entscheidungen zugrunde liegen, und versucht auf dieser Grundlage mögliche Problemfelder zu identifizieren, die der weiteren Klärung bedürfen.

Dr. Klaus Bacher ist Vorsitzender Richter am Bundesgerichtshof.

Mit gewerblichem Rechtsschutz und Kartellrecht war er seit 1995 in der Patentstreitkammer (Zivilkammer VII) des Landgerichts Mannheim und seit 2006 im dafür zuständigen Berufungssenat (6. Zivilsenat) des Oberlandesgerichts Karlsruhe befasst. Von 2000 bis 2003 war er wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter beim X. Zivilsenat des Bundesgerichtshofs. 2009 wurde er zum Richter am Bundesgerichtshof ernannt und dem X. Zivilsenat sowie dem Kartellsenat zugewiesen. Seit 2016 war er stellvertretender Vorsitzender des X. Zivilsenats. Seit 2020 ist er Vorsitzender dieses Senats.

Klaus Bacher ist unter anderem Mitautor des BeckOK ZPO, Mitherausgeber der GRUR sowie Herausgeber des Benkard und des von Otto Teplitzky begründeten Standardwerks „Wettbewerbsrechtliche Ansprüche und Verfahren“. Seit 2022 ist er Gastprofessor an der Tongji Universität in Shanghai.
 

Anmeldung per E-Mail bis zum 18. September

Generative AI is a transformative technology that has the potential to revolutionize the way we create and consume content. However, it raises a number of complex copyright concerns. In this talk, I will discuss the key concepts of generative AI, the current status quo, and the challenges that generative AI poses for copyright protection. I will also discuss potential technical solutions for protecting the copyright of artists in the age of generative AI.

Meeyoung Cha is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and an adjunct professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) in Germany. Her research interest is in developing and using Data Science and AI for challenging social problems. Her research on misinformation, fraud detection, and long-tail content has received over 20,000 citations. Meeyoung Cha is the first woman in Korea to receive the Young Information Scientist Award, and she is also a recipient of two Test-of-Time Awards (AAAI ICWSM, ACM IMC). In industry, Meeyoung worked as a visiting professor at Meta(Facebook)'s Data Science Team. She is a member of the Seoul Forum for International Affairs (SFIA) and a commissioner for the Korea Copyright Commission, the Korea Customs Service, the National Tax Service, and the Open Data Mediation Committee (ODMC). Meeyoung is currently jointly affiliated as a Chief Investigator at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in Korea, where she directs the Data Science Group.