Emanuele Tarantino

Research productivity depends on the ability to discern whether an idea is promising, and a willingness to abandon the ones that are not. Economists know little about this process, however, because empirical studies of innovation typically begin with a sample of issued patents or published papers that were already selected from a pool of promising ideas. This paper unpacks the idea selection process using a unique dataset from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a voluntary organization that develops protocols for managing Internet infrastructure. For a large sample of IETF proposals, we observe a sequence of decisions to either revise, publish, or abandon the underlying idea, along with changes to the proposal and the demographics of the author team. Using these data, we provide a...

In a model of industry standard setting with private information about firms' intellectual property, we analyze (a) firms' incentives to contribute to the development and improvement of a standard, and (b) firms' decision to disclose the existence of relevant intellectual property to other participants of the standard-setting process. If participants can disclose after the end of the process and fully exploit their bargaining leverage, then patent holders aspire to disclose always after the end of the process. However, if a patent holder cannot rely on the other participants to always contribute to the process, then it may be inclined to disclose before the end of the process. We also analyze under which conditions firms enter cross-licensing agreements that eliminate the strategic aspect ...