The Sale of Ideas: Strategic Disclosure, Property Rights, and Contracting
研究创意难以销售的问题：买方在披露前无法评估价值，卖方在披露后无法保护创意。作者提出可征用的部分披露可作为信号，使卖方基于未披露的专有技术获得报酬，并发现卖方财富对部分披露均衡和收益大小至关重要。
Ideas are difficult to sell when buyers cannot assess an idea's value before it is revealed and sellers cannot protect a revealed idea. These problems exist in a variety of intellectual property sales ranging from pure ideas to poorly protected inventions and reflect the nonverifiability of key elements of an intellectual property sale. An expropriable partial disclosure can be used as a signal, allowing the seller to obtain payment based on the value of the remaining (undisclosed) know-how. We examine contracting after the disclosure and find that seller wealth is pivotal in supporting a partial disclosure equilibrium and in determining the payoff size. Copyright 2002, Wiley-Blackwell.