This paper proposes a tractable model to study the equilibrium diversity of technological progress and shows that equilibrium technological progress may exhibit too little diversity (too much conformity), in particular, foregoing socially bene…cial investments in “alternative”technologies that will be used at some point in the future. The presence of future innovations that will replace current...

In this study, we use Stochastic Frontier analysis approach to estimate cost efficiency, economies of scale, and technological progress among Iranian banks from 1999 to 2012. The results show that there is a marked difference in cost efficiency before and after the recent financial sanctions against Iranian banking industry. Moreover, the results indicate that specialized government-owned banks...

This paper studies the effect of differences in the rate of technological progress between sectors on the relative sizes of those sectors in terms of revenues. There are two sectors: a stagnant sector, where productivity does not change over time, and a progressive sector, where costs decrease over time due to exogenous technological progress. We consider a conjectural variation approach to com...

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We study how best to reward innovators whose work builds on earlier innovations. Incentives to innovate are obtained by offering innovators the opportunity to profit from their innovations. Since innovations compete, awarding rights to one innovator reduces the value of the rights to prior innovators. We show that the optimal allocation involves shared rights, where more than one innovator is p...