by Serena S. Lam

Abstract 

The “anticommons effect” is a recently coined term to describe the phenomenon of stifled research and innovation in the biomedical research arena due to the growing number of overlapping patents in particular domains. Murray and Stern (2005) was the first to devise a novel strategy to quantify this effect by looking at the citation trend of papers with patented findings compared to that of non-patented ones published in Nature Biotechnology. This study continues this vein of research by looking at the differential anticommons effect on public vs. private sector researchers by dividing the citations of the articles used in Murray and Stern (2005) into public and private sector citations, and running a negative binomial fixed effects regression through both groups. Similarly, the citations were also divided into high vs. low tier journals, US vs. foreign authors, and scholarly vs. non-scholarly citations for further analysis. It was found that public sector citations dropped by 19.53% for patented articles compared to non-patented papers, while no such effect was found for private sector citations, suggesting that the anticommons effect is salient primarily for public sector researchers. A significant anticommons effect was also found for low tier journal citations (22.25%), US (15.96%) and foreign authored citations (21.72%), and for scholarly citations (17.26%) as measured by the average decrease in yearly citation rates for patented papers.

Professor Paul Ellickson, Faculty Advisor

JEL Codes: I23, O34,

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