Patents are widely recognized to provide legal protections to a firm’s inventions. However, such protections are dependent upon claims that delineate the exclusive rights of the patent. This study examines theoretically and empirically the role of exploitive and explorative search on a firm’s patent claims in the biotechnology industry. We argue that firms are subject to ‘boundedly rational’ behaviors where firms are unable to cite their patent’s prior art and therefore are unable to identify with their patent’s novel claims. A firm’s exploitive and explorative search is offered as a solution to overcoming such bounded rationality. We argue and find that a biotechnology firm’s exploitive and explorative search has an inverted u-shaped relationship to a firm’s patent claims. A key contribution of this study is that a firm’s citation behavior is not only attributed to strategic and legal motivations, but also be to behavioral explanations.

COVID-19 has overwhelmed healthcare systems across the globe with an unprecedented surge in the demand for hospitalizations. Consequently, many hospitals are facing precarious conditions due to limited capacity, especially in the provision of ventilators. The governing ethical principles of medical practice delineated in (1) favor prioritizing younger patients, largely because of their relatively higher expected life years. We conduct a survey of the general public in the United States to elicit their preferences for the allocation of a limited number of ventilators. The results show that the general public views align with the established ethical principles, which favor younger patients.JEL Classification: C91.

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The Low Carbon Fuel Standards (LCFS) represents a new policy approach designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by applying standards to all stages of motor fuel production. We use the synthetic control and difference-in-differences econometric methods, and Lasso machine learning to analyze the effect of the LCFS on emissions in California’s transportation sector. The three different techniques provide robust evidence that the LCFS reduced carbon dioxide emissions in California’s transportation sector by around 10%. Furthermore, our calculations show that improved air quality, due to the application of the LCFS, may have benefited California in the magnitude of hundreds of millions of dollars through an increase in worker’s productivity.

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