Veranstaltungen

Megaprojects, Digital Platforms, and Productivity: Evidence from the Human Brain Project
Presenter: Ann-Christin Kreyer (MPI) 
Discussant: Elisa Gerten (ISTO)

How to build institutions to facilitate large-scale, long-term life science projects? This paper studies the impact of the Human Brain Project (HBP), a 10-year (2013-2023) flagship project funded by the European Union, which offers a valuable setting for institutions that provide long-term infrastructure and grant support to neuroscience, computing, and brain-related medicine. We construct new data that track the individuals involved in the HBP, the timing of active engagement, and research output (e.g., publications). We exploit plausibly exogenous variation based on the phase-relevant resource allocation and individual engagement. We use current methods in the difference-in-difference (DiD) with two-way fixed effects, combined with natural language processing tools (esp. topic classification) to capture the evolution in research topics: fundamental neuroscience, neurotech, AI-robotics, and patient care. We find that the HBP has gained attraction over time, with more individuals actively participating from more geographically diverse bases, particularly junior faculties and graduate students. We find that participation in the HBP leads to increased individual productivity in publications per year, an expanded coauthor network, more citations, and a higher likelihood of publishing in a top neuroscience journal. All topic areas share the increased research productivity and impact, especially in the neurotech topic areas that combine neuroscience and CS/AI. These results are particularly driven by junior scholars (junior faculties and graduate students). The overall patterns are qualitatively similar for the subsample containing female scholars, despite smaller magnitudes and less precision. Scholars based in Germany, Italy, and Belgium demonstrated more pronounced increases in publications per author year for neuroscience and AI researchers. This paper has broad policy implications with new evidence that upstream digital collaborative institution design can help facilitate high-impact interdisciplinary neuroscience research, which is a critical input in discovering new and better treatments for brain diseases.

Suing Upstream or Downstream? A Value Chain Perspective on Defendant Selection in Patent Infringement Suits
Presenter: Adrian Goettfried (TUM)
Discussant: Elisabeth Hofmeister (MPI)

Patent infringement suits may target various parties in the value chain, from the original implementer who translated the patented invention into a technical artifact downward to a commercial user of the final product. We analyze the plaintiff’s selection of “litigation level”, i.e., the level in the value chain on which the defendant is active. We distinguish between “direct litigation”, where the defendant is the original implementer of the patent; and “indirect litigation”, where the defendant is downstream from the original implementer. Drawing on anchoring and transaction cost theory, we hypothesize which factors render bifurcated patent infringement suits more likely. We present empirical findings from a study of 247 patent infringement suits filed at US district courts between 2010 and 2016. 38% of the analyzed patent infringement suits are indirect, with a particularly high prevalence in retail trade (78%) and services (58%; e.g., software or computer services). Indirect suits are relatively rare in manufacturing industries (25%), with electronics being the only exception (51%). In multivariate analysis, we find indirect patent infringement suits to be associated with complex technologies, open standards covered by standard-essential patents, and product patents, supporting three of our hypotheses. We contribute theoretically to research on value capture by suggesting antecedents of direct and indirect patent infringement suits. We discuss policy implications arising from the relative efficiency of the two modes and identify the need for managers to take an end-to-end perspective on IP risks in the value chain.

This paper quantifies the role of family background in who becomes an inventor in India — using the information content in surnames. Indian surnames typically contain information about one’s caste, religion, or geographic origin. Based on records of all adult Indians alive (~850 million individuals), a national survey of 130 million families, and historical registers from the British India civil service and university graduates in the 1850s, we develop a novel dataset to track inequality between family groups over time and space in India. We find that based on family background alone, the bottom two-thirds of India’s population (~1 billion individuals) have a very low chance of becoming an entrepreneur, inventor, scientist, or even participating in national entrance exams for top universities. This pattern is unique to India with no other major country having nearly as much name-based advantage in outcomes. Integrating marginalized communities will not only benefit the excluded communities within India but will also enable India to enhance its aggregate contribution to the global economy and to the knowledge frontier.
(Joint work with Ruchir Agarwal)

Ansprechpartner: Albert Roger

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.

Patent protection was introduced for plant biotechnology in the United States in 1985, and it affected crops differentially depending on their reproductive structures. Exploiting this unique feature of plant physiology and a new dataset of crop-specific technology development, I find that the introduction of patent rights increased the development of novel plant varieties in affected crops. Technology development was driven by a rapid increase in private sector investment, was accompanied by positive spillover effects on innovation in certain non-biological agricultural technologies, and led to an increase in crop yields. Patent rights, however, could come with potentially significant costs to the consumers of technology and distortions to downstream production. Nevertheless, I document that in US counties that were more exposed to the change in patent law because of their crop composition, land values and profits increased. Taken together, the results suggest that the prospect of patent protection spurred technological progress and increased downstream productivity and profits.

Ansprechpartner: Albert Roger

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.

Diskutieren Sie mit Sören Auer und Dietmar Harhoff über Digitalisierung und Innovationsprozesse in Deutschland. Auer und Harhoff sprechen über Hürden und Hindernisse auf dem Weg hin zur Entwicklung und Einführung von Innovationen und diskutieren anregende Beispiele erfolgreicher Programme, die eine maßgebliche Rolle bei der Förderung von Digitalisierung und Innovation in Deutschland gespielt haben.

Die Veranstaltung wird online via Zoom durchgeführt und findet in deutscher Sprache statt.

Registrieren Sie sich hier für den Zoom-Link.

Der Max Planck Digitality Fireside Chat ist ein informelles Veranstaltungsformat für intensive Gespräche und Diskussionen zu Digitalität und digitaler Transformation. Ziel ist es, Modelle für den Umgang mit der digitalen Transformation und Digitalität an sich tiefgehend erörtern zu können. Das Konzept erlaubt einen Austausch zwischen Forschenden und digitalen Pionieren aus der Praxis, die mit neuen Konzepten, Vorschlägen und Ideen hervorgetreten sind und Digitalisierung aktiv gestalten. 

The Swedish system has for long been one of the most generous with respect to family parental leave policies in the world. Is there evidence that this system raises women's possibilities of an academic career? I present new longitudinal evidence for more than 11,000 first-time fathers and mothers, examining survival chances with a focus on the characterizing the gender gap in terms of wages and publications. Descriptive statistics show that women in the Swedish system are somewhat behind men in their academic career in terms of publication rate and positional advancement before having children, which is in part due to their younger age. After their first child, the publication gap between men and women is substantially widened across all fields, conditional on staying in academia, while this drop is not nearly as severe for wages.  Women have only slightly lower survival chances than men after their first child. In recent years, parental leave has become more equally shared between fathers and mother, but I find no evidence that this trend has lowered child penalty rates for women in publications, rather the opposite. This suggests that a more equal distribution of parental leave may not be a panacea to improving women's career prospects in academia. 

Ansprechpartner: Rainer Widmann

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.

On 18/19 December 2023, the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition will host the 6th Research on Innovation, Science and Entrepreneurship Workshop (RISE6), an annual workshop for Ph.D. students and Junior Post-docs in Economics and Management. 

The goal of the RISE6 Workshop is to stimulate an in-depth discussion of a select number of empirical research papers. It offers Ph.D. students and Junior Post-docs an opportunity to present their work and to receive feedback.

Keynote speaker of the RISE6 Workshop is Ina Ganguli (UMass Amherst).

See the Program RISE6.

For more information see RISE Workshop.

Boundary-Spanning Technology Search, Product Component Reuse, and New Product Innovation: Evidence from the Smartphone Industry
Presenter: Kyung Yul Lee (TUM) (co-authored with H. J. Jung and Y. Kwon)
Discussant: Mingpei Li (Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb)

How Complementarities between Technology, Environmental Compliance, and Management Practices Drive Firm Productivity: Evidence from German Firms
Presenter: Elisa Gerten (ISTO)
Discussant: Pietro Fantini (TUM)

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 project, along with changes to the proposal and the demographics of the author team. Using these data, we provide a descriptive analysis of how R&D is conducted within the IETF, and estimate a dynamic discrete choice model whose key parameters measure the speed at which author teams learn whether they have a good (i.e., publishable) idea. The estimates imply that sixty percent of IETF proposals are publishable, but only one-third of the good ideas survive the review process. Author experience and increased attention from the IETF community are associated with faster learning. Finally, we simulate two innovation policies: a research subsidy and a publication-prize. Subsidies have a larger impact on research output, though prizes perform better when accounting for researchers’ opportunity costs.

Ansprechpartner: David Heller

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.

Data is a central resource of and multiple-use production factor in the 21^st century. Data creation, data processing, data use, and data transfer is – in the words of data geopolitics – inherently linked to the competitiveness of not only economies, but also of societies. Nevertheless, the quest for an adequate and balanced governance framework is on-going – whereby data governance does not only, but also encompasses hard and soft law regulation. The respective field of data law is emerging and not yet fully ‘surveyed’, still in the process of making as well as fragmented along the lines of existing rules and recent policy efforts. The legal (and infrastructural) taxonomy is in flux and an inherent element of modern-day data strategies worldwide.

Underlining this global nature of data governance, the conference is aimed at a truly global view on data law instruments – where the current EU pieces of legislation (inter alia the General Data Protection Regulation as well as the Data Governance Act and the proposed Data Act) are only one of many approaches. Most important, the conference is devoted to a contextual – and a decolonial comparative law – approach to data regulation – including cultural, economic, and infrastructural dimensions of data governance and linking perspectives from the global north and global south as well from liberal and authoritarian settings.

The conference is co-organized by the University of Passau Research Centre for Law and Digitalisation (FREDI) and the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition. The event is the final part of a three-tier conference series on Global Data Law and element of a greater research agenda with respect to Global Data Law & Policy.

Visit the website on the Conference Series on Global Data Law.
 

Program as pdf

Registration is open up to and including 26 November 2023.

Benedict Probst presents his vision for the independent research group, which will be hosted at the Institute. He gives first an overview of his background and his past academic work. Then, he speaks about his plans for the group and gives an overview of the envisaged research projects.