Volume 19, Issue 2

A large literature has used patent data to measure knowledge spillovers across inventions but few papers have explicitly measured the impact of the collaboration networks formed by inventors on the quality of invention. This paper develops a method to measure the impact of collaboration networks of inventors on invention quality. We apply this methodology to the information and communication technology (ICT) and information security sectors in Israel and find that the quality of Israeli inventions are systematically linked to the structure of the collaborative network in these sectors. We are very grateful to the editor Lukasz Grzybowski and an anonymous referee for very helpful comments and suggestions that significantly improved the paper. We thank the Maurice Falk Institute for Economic Research in Israel, Start-Up Nation Central, the U. S. National Science Foundation (SciSIP grants 1360165 and 1360170), and Portugal’s Foundation for Science and Technology for financial support of this research. Lee Branstetter’s work on this project was supported by the National Science Foundation and we thank Britta Glennon for excellent research assistance. We are also grateful to Tim Bresnahan, Eugene Kandel, Imke Reimers, and seminar/conference participants at the 19th CEPR IO conference, the 10th Paris conference on Digital Economics, Collegio Carlo Alberto, Hebrew University, Stanford University, Tel Aviv University, ad UC-Berkeley and for helpful comments and suggestions. © 2020 by Neil Gandal, Nadav Kunievsky, and Lee Branstetter. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including the © notice, is given to the source.

This paper develops a theoretical framework to discuss the positive role of imitative works where creators often have private information about their creative abilities and may need outside investment. Within this framework, we consider the impact of three types of copyright protection during the different stages: the production, distribution, and consumption of creative works. Different types of enforcement can discourage imitation (production-side enforcement), limit distribution (supply-side enforcement), and restrict consumption (demand-side enforcement) of unauthorized copies of creative works. The last two types of infringement are called end-user piracy since these involve end-users, who actively search and illegally access creative works. The main results show that substitutability exists between copyright protection against end-user piracy since both types of enforcement increase the creator’s incentive with a higher return. However, it cannot solve the inefficient investment problem due to information asymmetry. There exists complementarity between copyright protection against end-user piracy and imitation. When weak protection against end-user piracy yields the overproduction of creative works, a high level of protection against imitation can minimize the related inefficiencies. However, when end-user piracy enforcement increases and brings underproduction, imitative works can benefit society.