Social and Technological Efficiency of Patent Systems

This article develops an evolutionary model of industry dynamics in order to carry out a richer theoretical analysis of the consequences of a stronger patent system. The first results obtained in our article are rather consistent with the anti-patent arguments and they do not favour the case for a stronger patent system: higher social welfare and technical progress are observed in our model in industries with milder patent systems (lower patent height and patent life).Innovation, technical progress, patent system, Intellectual property rights,

Efficiency of network structures: The needle in the haystack

The modelling of networks formation has recently became the object of an increasing interest in economics. One of the important issues raised in this literature is the one of networks efficiency. Nevertheless, for non trivial payoff functions, searching for efficient network structures turns out to be a very difficult analytical problem as well as a huge computational task, even for a relatively small number of agents. In this paper, we explore the possibility of using genetic algorithms (GA) techniques for identifying efficient network structures, because the GA have proved their power as a tool for solving complex optimization problems. The robustness of this method in predicting optimal network structures is tested on two simple stylized models introduced by Jackson and Wolinski (1996), for which the efficient networks are known over the whole state space of parameter values.Networks, Optimal network structure, Efficiency, Genetic Algorithms