Runner-up Patents: Is Monopoly Inevitable?
研究了允许后续发明者在特定时间内共享专利的机制，发现这种“亚军专利”在一般条件下能提高社会福利，并提出了时间窗口作为新的政策工具。
Exclusive patents sacrifice product competition to provide firms incentives to innovate. We characterize an alternative mechanism whereby later inventors are allowed to share the patent if they discover within a certain time period of the first inventor. These runner-up patents increase social welfare under very general conditions. Furthermore, we show that the time window during which later inventors can share the patent should become a new policy tool at the disposal of the designer. This instrument will be used in a socially optimal mix with the breadth and length of the patent and could allow sorting between more or less efficient firms.