Property rights, firm boundaries, and the republic of science—A note on Ashish Arora and Robert Merges

In the past few years, there has been a proliferation of literature devoted to the study of the economic impact of intellectual property rights (IPRs), to the point that any comprehensive review becomes difficult1. However, the above scientific debate has principally revolved around the role of IPRs as an incentive to create and to invent, building upon the central idea of the economic theory of intellectual property that attributing exclusive rights to creators and inventors remedies an underproduction of market-oriented information and so averts a market failure. Such an approach is informed by the Coasean reference model in which the allocation of property rights provides an efficient solution to the problem of public goods and externalities (Coase, 1960). Nevertheless, the prevalence of the above view has meant that many other scientific avenues of economic theory under which intellectual property could be gainfully studied have been largely neglected.