Economists: Markets outperform patents in promoting intellectual discovery

beat us to the patent punch.

On the other hand, Bossaerts notes, studies have shown that more than 50 percent of people think they are better than the median — a statistical impossibility, but one that can be exploited in the marketplace to generate trade.

The researchers were able to provide concrete evidence for these ideas by running a series of experiments in which participants were asked to solve what is known as “the knapsack problem.” In the knapsack problem, participants are given a large number of items to pack into a knapsack that cannot possibly hold all of the items; their job is to try to figure out how to maximize the number of “valuable” items they can fit into the knapsack.

“These aren’t always the most expensive items,” says Bossaerts. “For instance, if you’re packing the knapsack to go on a trip, one of the items you would consider most valuable would probably be a toothbrush.” Participants in Bossaerts’s knapsack experiment had to solve one set of problems under a regime that worked in much the same way as a traditional patent system, with a $66 reward for whoever figured out the solution first.

The second set of problems was to be solved in a kind of free-trading market regime. Each item that could go into the knapsack was given a different price, and each participant was given five securities per item at the beginning of the experiment. They were then encouraged to buy and sell their securities for the various items, stocking up on shares of items they believed were likely to be included in the problem’s solution, and getting rid of shares of items they thought would be left out of the knapsack.

Once the solution was revealed, the securities of the left-behind items became worthless, while the participants who had bought up shares of the included items were allowed to keep their earnings of $1 a share. While nobody won the full $66 as in the patent groups, several people in the market groups were able to benefit financially from coming up with a workable solution to the problem.

That solution did not even have to be the optimal one, Bossaerts notes. “They didn’t have to fully solve the problem to benefit financially,” he explains. “They could solve only part of the problem — figure out a few items they believed would be in the solution, or those they thought wouldn’t be