An informer sequentially collects and disseminates information through costly research to persuade an evaluator to approve an activity. Payoffs and control rights are split between informer and evaluator depending on the organizational rules governing the approval process. The welfare benchmark corresponds to Wald’s classic solution for a statistician with payoff equal to the sum of informer and evaluator. Organizations with different commitment power of informer and evaluator are compared from a positive and normative perspective. Granting authority to the informer is socially optimal when information acquisition is sufficiently costly. The analysis is applied to the regulatory process for drug approval. (JEL D82, D83, I18, L51, L65, O31)
In situations where a biased sender provides verifiable information to a receiver, I study how strategic reporting affects the incentives to search for information. Research provides series of signals that can be used selectively in reporting. I show that the sender is strictly worse off when his research effort is not observed by the receiver: he has to conduct more research than in the observable case and in equilibrium, discloses all the information he obtained. However this extra research can be socially beneficial and mandatory disclosure of results can thus be welfare reducing. Finally I identify cases where the sender withholds evidence and for which mandatory disclosure rules become more attractive. Copyright � The Author(s). Journal compilation � Royal Economic Society 2009.
The sale of R&D projects through licensing facilitates the division of labor between research and development activities. This vertical specialization can improve the overall efficiency of the innovative process. However, these gains depend on the timing of the sale: the buyer of an R&D project should assume development at the stage at which he has an efficiency advantage. We show that in an environment where the seller is overconfident about the value of the project, she may delay the sale to the more efficient firm in order to provide verifiable information about its quality, though this delay implies higher total development costs for the project. We obtain a condition for the equilibrium timing of licensing and examine how factors such as the intensity of competition between potential buyers influence it. We show that a wide array of different explanations, based on differences in information, beliefs or risk profiles, lead to the same qualitative results. We present empirical evidence from pharmaceutical licensing contracts that is consistent with our theoretical predictions. * Henry thanks the support of the Agence Nationale de la Recherche through its program Chaire d'excellence junior. Kyle thanks Pfizer Inc. for research center support to IDEI.
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