Meloso Debrah, Copic Jernej, Bossaerts Peter
Bocconi University, 20136 Milan, Italy.
Science. 2009 Mar 6;323(5919):1335-9. doi: 10.1126/science.1158624.
Because they provide exclusive property rights, patents are generally considered to be an effective way to promote intellectual discovery. Here, we propose a different compensation scheme, in which everyone holds shares in the components of potential discoveries and can trade those shares in an anonymous market. In it, incentives to invent are indirect, through changes in share prices. In a series of experiments, we used the knapsack problem (in which participants have to determine the most valuable subset of objects that can fit in a knapsack of fixed volume) as a typical representation of intellectual discovery problems. We found that our "markets system" performed better than the patent system.
由于专利提供了排他性的产权，它们通常被认为是促进知识发现的有效方式。在此，我们提出一种不同的补偿方案，即每个人持有潜在发现的组成部分的股份，并可以在一个匿名市场中交易这些股份。在该方案中，发明的激励是间接的，通过股价的变化来实现。在一系列实验中，我们将背包问题（参与者必须确定能够装入固定容量背包的最有价值的物品子集）作为知识发现问题的典型代表。我们发现我们的“市场系统”比专利系统表现得更好。
