Information and Intellectual Property: The Global Challenges

Like “golden weddings”, there are also “golden papers”: seminal papers which appear to be characterized by their uniqueness in having raised issues which fifty years after they have been written look as relevant as they probably did fifty years ago. Paul David (2003) in reviewing Zvi Griliches contributions to the economics profession, noticed with typical shrewd insight how the numbers of citations to Zvi’s earliest 1957 Econometrica paper on the diffusion of hybrid corn followed themselves over the last 40 years the “canonical profile of a diffusion curve...self-exemplifying the subject matter treated by the article in question”. And Paul David to contrast this pattern with the citation pattern to some of the other most cited papers of Griliches, which followed very different, but surprisingly each time fitting citation patterns: a distributed lags pattern in the case of Zvi’s survey article on “Distributed Lags” in Econometrica in 1967 and a more or less constant citation trend rate in the case of his paper with Dale Jorgenson on productivity change in Review of Economic Studies. Elaborating further on this fascinating David citation hypothesis, one might hypothesize that the citations over time to Richard Nelson’s 1959 golden paper on “The simple economics of basic scientific research” would correspond well to a gradual cumulative trend, corresponding to “the collective, cumulative evolutionary nature of technological advance” to use the words just used by Dick himself in revisiting his “old” paper, whereas those with respect to Kenneth Arrow’s golden paper on “Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Invention” from 1962 – probably less cited than his "The Economic Implications of Learning by Doing" of the same year – would maybe not bring a specific pattern in citations to the forefront except to highlight that the information contained in this golden