Events

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room E10

Professor Wang introduces a theory of intelligence, a formal model of the theory, and a computer implementation of the model. He takes “Intelligence” as the ability of adaptation under insufficient knowledge and resources. Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System (NARS) is a formal model realizing this theory, which has been implemented in an open source project OpenNARS. The system shows many properties observed in the human mind. Practical applications of this technique are also under development.

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

Strategic behavior can not only affect effort in contests but also undermine their selection function. We investigate two forms of strategic behavior of contestants with heterogeneous ability in large contests: Sabotage and self-promotion. We test predictions from a simple theoretical model in a large dataset of more than 38 million peer-ratings by 75,000 individuals. We find a) that strategic behavior influences outcomes in 25% of close contests, b) that self-promotion is the dominant form of strategic behavior of low-ability contestants, and c) that high-ability contestants are both culprits and targets of sabotage. We leverage two natural experiments to rule out alternative explanations.

Contact Person: Klaus Keller, M.A.

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

Japan counts as the third largest market for medical devices after the US and the EU, and displays an exceptionally high number of certain technologies per capita (e.g. CT and MRI). Surprisingly, most appliances are imported to Japan nowadays pointing to a drop in innovation activities since the 1990s. A change can be observed rather recently under PM Abe by integrating the field of medical devices into the scheme of the Japan Revitalisation Strategy (Abenomics), which aims at “renkei” ni yoru “jitsuyōka” (market cultivation through partnerships) between medical centres, academia and manufacturing companies (METI 2016). Against this backdrop, this paper sheds light on which factors lead to this situation by focusing particularly on disciplinary boundaries. What is more, the presentation highlights current efforts on medtech partnerships, cluster policies and matching-hubs to cross these boundaries and to encourage innovation activities in the field of medical devices in Japan. The paper mainly draws on insights from research literature and preliminary findings from two case studies. Based on these findings it can be said that regional authorities and municipalities promote R&D activities by offering subsidies to small and medium-size enterprises (SME) and organising matching-hubs for ikō renkei (medtech partnership) such as in Tokyo, Kobe, Kyushu, Fukushima and Shizuoka but with varying degrees of success.

Contact Person: Dr. Marina Chugunova

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Room E10

Moderation: Jörg Hoffmann

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

Estimates of the private and social rates of return to investments in R&D are of high interest to economists, managers and policymakers. An important problem in the literature is that the canonical model used to obtain such estimates only allows R&D to diffuse through spillovers. This is a serious limitation in a world increasingly characterized by active intellectual property (IP) enforcement and monetization. We create a new dataset of interactions in the market for technology between publicly held firms in the U.S. which allows us to generalize the canonical model with both spillovers and market-mediated technology transfers. We obtain four main findings using changes in tax incentives for R&D to identify causal effects. First, R&D accessed through technology markets is an important input in the generation of revenue. Second, conventional spillover estimates are contaminated with technology transfers because the weights traditionally used to capture spillovers are strongly correlated with matching in the market for technology. Third, the private rate of return to R&D is larger in the generalized framework while the wedge between the social and private returns is smaller. Finally, back of the envelope estimates suggest that the gains from trade in the market for technology might be larger than $1 trillion per year, accounting for 10% of total revenue in Compustat.

Contact Person: Dr. Rainer Widmann

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

An increasing number of research projects successfully involves the general public (the crowd) in tasks such as collecting observational data or classifying images to answer scientists’ research questions. Although such crowd science projects have generated great hopes among scientists and policy makers, it is not clear whether the crowd can also meaningfully contribute to other stages of the research process, in particular the identification of research questions that should be studied. We first develop a conceptual framework that ties different aspects of “good” research questions to different types of knowledge. We then discuss potential strengths and weaknesses of the crowd compared to professional scientists in developing research questions, while also considering important heterogeneity among crowd members. Data from a series of online and field experiments has been gathered and is currently analyzed to test individual- and crowd-level hypotheses focusing on the underlying mechanisms that influence a crowd’s performance in generating research questions. Our results aim for advancing the literatures on crowd and citizen science as well as the broader literature on crowdsourcing and the organization of open and distributed knowledge production. Our findings have important implications for scientists and policy makers.

Contact Person: Michael E. Rose, Ph.D.

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

We investigate the determinants of industry researchers’ interactions with universities in different localities, distinguishing between local and international universities. We analyze the extent to which local and international interactions are enabled by different types of individual personal networks (education, career based), and by their access to different business networks through their employer companies (local vs. domestic or international multinational company networks). We control for selection bias and numerous other individual and firm-level factors identified in the literature as important determinants of interaction with universities. Our findings suggest that industry researchers’ personal networks play a greater role in promoting interactions with local universities (i.e. in the same region, and other regions in the same country) while researcher employment in a multinational is especially important for establishing interaction with universities abroad.

Contact Person: Michael E. Rose, Ph.D.

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

This paper studies the changes in the influence of leading journals in economics, sociology and physics from 1975 to 2017. In economics, the influence of the so-called top 5 journals relative to second tier and top field journals increased starkly in the 1980s and 1990s, stabilizing afterwards. Moreover, the influence of top field journals showed a remarkable convergence in the same period. In contrast, in sociology the relative influence of top journals decreased in the 1980s. We then try to explain these different trends in a model of journal platform competition.

Contact Person: Michael E. Rose, Ph.D.

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

Does an increase in female medical researchers lead to more medical advances for women? In this paper, we investigate whether inventors’ gender is related to the content of their inventions. Using data on the universe of US biomedical patents, we find that patents with women inventors are significantly more likely to focus on female diseases and conditions. Consistent with the idea of women researchers choosing to innovate for women, we find stronger effects when the lead inventor on the patent is a woman. Women-led research teams are 26 percent more likely to focus on female health outcomes. Our findings suggest that the demography of inventors matters not just for who invents but also for what is invented.

Contact Person: Michael E. Rose, Ph.D.