Innovation Law and Policy Workshop
Christopher Sprigman
Associate Professor of Law, University of Virginia Law School
Valuing Intellectual Property: An Experiment
Date: Monday, January 11, 2010
Time: 12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Place: Classroom A, Flavelle House, 78 Queen’s Park
In recent years, research in behavioral decision theory has shown that people’s attempts to value goods are affected by a number of systematic biases that create departures from rationality. Perhaps the most important and most empirically robust bias is the endowment effect – the finding that the owners of goods value them significantly more than do purchasers of goods. Although research has detected endowment effects associated with a wide variety of goods, as yet, no study has sought to measure the effect with goods that were created by the owner. This project attempts to fill this lacuna in the field. We hypothesized that the creators of works of original expression (in this case haikus) will value them significantly more than will potential buyers of the products. Moreover, we anticipated finding an even greater departure from rationality for creators than for mere owners of the products. The data we have collected to date (representing approx. 90% of the total data we plan to collect) support our first hypothesis (i.e., we see a very large valuation gap between authors and buyers), but not our second (authors and mere owners seem to behave similarly). After describing the experiment and the data, this paper will explore its implications for intellectual property law and possible variations on the subject.
Chris Sprigman (J.D., University of Chicago Law School, 1993; B.A., University of Pennsylvania, 1988) teaches intellectual property law, antitrust law, competition policy, and comparative constitutional law. His scholarship focuses on how legal rules affect innovation and the deployment of new technologies.
Sprigman received his B.A. with honors from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988. He attended the University of Chicago Law School, serving as a Comment Editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and graduating with honors in 1993. Following graduation, Sprigman clerked for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and for Justice Lourens H. W. Ackermann of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Sprigman also taught at the law school of the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa. From 1999 to 2001, Sprigman served as Appellate Counsel in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked on U.S. v. Microsoft, among other matters. Sprigman then joined the Washington, D.C. office of King & Spalding LLP, where he was elected a partner. In 2003, he left law practice to become a Residential Fellow at the Center for Internet & Society at Stanford Law School. He joined the Virginia faculty in 2005.
A light lunch will be provided.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca
Sponsored by the Microsoft Law and Information Society Project
