Inventing Prizes

Abstract

Academics and policymakers alike tend to motivate their claims about innovation prizes with a cluster of popular, but previously unexamined, historical anecdotes. As a result, canonical case studies like the award for gauging longitude at sea, the success of efforts to induce new methods of food preservation in France, and “Daguerrotype patent buyouts” have had a disproportionate effect on our understanding of institutions and incentives for inventive activity. Closer attention to the specific details derived from the primary records reveals key misapprehensions and inaccuracies, implying that the oft-recited conclusions about technological prizes are largely misleading.