Voluntary Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs) use a consensus process to create new compatibility standards. Practitioners have suggested that SSOs are increasingly politicized and perhaps incapable of producing timely standards. This article develops a simple model of standard setting committees and tests its predictions using data from the Internet Engineering Task Force, an SSO that produces many of the standards used to run the Internet. The results show that an observed slowdown in standards production between 1993 and 2003 can be linked to distributional conflicts created by the rapid commercialization of the Internet. (JEL C78, L15, L86)

Abstract We document a series of stylized facts about how firms seek to protect the rents from innovation, using a large nationally representative survey of U.S. businesses over the period 2008-2015. Just 1.4 percent of firms obtain patents, but these patenting firms account for 87 percent of R&D investment. Firms consider utility patents less important than other forms of IP protection, like trade secrets, trademarks, and copyrights. Firm industry and size are strongly correlated with firms’ use of all types of intellectual property, but firm-age is not. Implications for innovation research and policy are discussed.

We study the adoption, diffusion, and impacts of the Universal Product Code (UPC) between 1975 and 1992, during the initial years of the bar code system. We find evidence of network effects in the diffusion process. Matched-sample difference-in-differences estimates show that firm size and trademark registrations increase following UPC adoption by manufacturers. Industry-level import penetration also increases with domestic UPC adoption. Our findings suggest that bar codes, scanning, and related technologies helped stimulate variety-enhancing product innovation and encourage the growth of international retail supply chains.