Michael A. Heller

Bio: Michael A. Heller is an academic researcher from Columbia University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Private property & Property law. The author has an hindex of 19, co-authored 51 publications receiving 4863 citations. Previous affiliations of Michael A. Heller include University of Michigan & Yale University.

Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research

Abstract: The “tragedy of the commons” metaphor helps explain why people overuse shared resources. However, the recent proliferation of intellectual property rights in biomedical research suggests a different tragedy, an “anticommons” in which people underuse scarce resources because too many owners can block each other. Privatization of biomedical research must be more carefully deployed to sustain both upstream research and downstream product development. Otherwise, more intellectual property rights may lead paradoxically to fewer useful products for improving human health.

The Tragedy of the Anticommons: Property in the Transition from Marx to Markets

Abstract: Why are many storefronts in Moscow empty while street kiosks in front are full of goods? This article develops a theory of anticommons property to help explain the puzzle of empty storefronts and full kiosks. Anticommons property can be understood as the mirror image of commons property. By definition, in a commons, multiple owners are each endowed with the privilege to use a given resource, and no one has the right to exclude another. When too many owners hold such privileges of use, the resource is prone to overuse ? a tragedy of the commons. Depleted fisheries and overgrazed fields are canonical examples of this familiar tragedy. In an anticommons, multiple owners are each endowed with the right to exclude others from a scarce resource, and no one has an effective privilege of use. When too many owners hold such rights of exclusion, the resource is prone to underuse ? a tragedy of the anticommons. Empty Moscow storefronts are a canonical example of the tragedy of underuse. Anticommons property may appear whenever governments define new property rights in both post-socialist and developed market economies. Once an anticommons emerges, collecting rights into usable private property bundles can be brutal and slow. The difficulties of overcoming a tragedy of the anticommons suggest that policymakers should pay more attention to the content of property bundles, rather than focusing just on the clarity of rights.

The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives

Abstract: 25 new runways would eliminate most air travel delays in America. Why can't we build them? 50 patent owners are blocking a major drug maker from creating a cancer cure. Why won't they get out of the way? 90% of our broadcast spectrum sits idle while American cell phone service lags far behind Japan's and Korea's. Why are we wasting our airwaves? 98% of African American-owned farms have been sold off over the last century. Why can't we stop the loss? All these problems are really the same problem-one whose solution would jump-start innovation, release trillions in productivity, and help revive our slumping economy. Every so often an idea comes along that transforms our understanding of how the world works. Michael Heller has discovered a market dynamic that no one knew existed. Usually, private ownership creates wealth, but too much ownership has the opposite effect-it creates gridlock. When too many people own pieces of one thing, whether a physical or intellectual resource, cooperation breaks down, wealth disappears, and everybody loses. Heller's paradox is at the center of The Gridlock Economy. Today's leading edge of innovation-in high tech, biomedicine, music, film, real estate-requires the assembly of separately owned resources. But gridlock is blocking economic growth all along the wealth creation frontier. A thousand scholars have applied and verified Heller's paradox. Now he takes readers on a lively tour of gridlock battlegrounds. Heller zips from medieval robber barons to modern-day broadcast spectrum squatters; from Mississippi courts selling African-American family farms to troubling New York City land confiscations; and from Chesapeake Bay oyster pirates to today's gene patent and music mash-up outlaws. Each tale offers insights into how to spot gridlock in operation and how we can overcome it. The Gridlock Economy is a startling, accessible biography of an idea. Nothing is inevitable about gridlock. It results from choices we make about how to control the resources we value most. We can unlock the grid; this book shows us where to start.

The Boundaries of Private Property

Abstract: The American law of property encourages people to create wealth by breaking up and recombining resources in novel ways. But fragmenting resources proves easier than putting them back together again. Property law responds by limiting the one-way ratchet of fragmentation. Hidden within the law is a boundary principle that keeps resources well-scaled for productive use. Recently, however, the Supreme Court has been labeling more and more fragments as private property, an approach that paradoxically undermines the usefulness of private property as an economic institution and Constitutional category. Identifying the boundary principle threads together disparate property law doctrines, clarifies strange asymmetries in property theory, and unknots some takings law puzzles. An earlier version of this article was announced as University of Michigan Law School, Law and Economics Working Paper No. 99-010. The working paper can be downloaded from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=173851

Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research

Abstract: The “tragedy of the commons” metaphor helps explain why people overuse shared resources. However, the recent proliferation of intellectual property rights in biomedical research suggests a different tragedy, an “anticommons” in which people underuse scarce resources because too many owners can block each other. Privatization of biomedical research must be more carefully deployed to sustain both upstream research and downstream product development. Otherwise, more intellectual property rights may lead paradoxically to fewer useful products for improving human health.

The Knowledge Economy

Abstract: We define the knowledge economy as production and services based on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to an accelerated pace of technical and scientific advance, as well as rapid obsolescence. The key component of a knowledge economy is a greater reliance on intellectual capabilities than on physical inputs or natural resources. We provide evidence drawn from patent data to document an upsurge in knowledge production and show that this expansion is driven by the emergence of new industries. We then review the contentious literature that assesses whether recent technological advances have raised productivity. We examine the debate over whether new forms of work that embody technological change have generated more worker autonomy or greater managerial control. Finally, we assess the distributional consequences of a knowledge-based economy with respect to growing inequality in wages and high-quality jobs.

Sociology of Science

Abstract: The Social Contexts of Research. Edited by Saad Z. Nagi and Ronald G. Corwin. Pp. xii + 409. (John Wiley: New York and London, August 1972.) £5.65.

Navigating the Patent Thicket: Cross Licenses, Patent Pools, and Standard-Setting

Abstract: In several key industries, including semiconductors, biotechnology, computer software, and the Internet, our patent system is creating a patent thicket: an overlapping set of patent rights requiring that those seeking to commercialize new technology obtain licenses from multiple patentees. The patent thicket is especially thorny when combined with the risk of hold-up, namely the danger that new products will inadvertently infringe on patents issued after these products were designed. The need to navigate the patent thicket and hold-up is especially pronounced in industries such as telecommunications and computing in which formal standard-setting is a core part of bringing new technologies to market. Cross-licenses and patent pools are two natural and effective methods used by market participants to cut through the patent thicket, but each involves some transaction costs. Antitrust law and enforcement, with its historical hostility to cooperation among horizontal rivals, can easily add to these transaction costs. Yet a few relatively simple principles, such as the desirability package licensing for complementary patents but not for substitute patents, can go a long way towards insuring that antitrust will help solve the problems caused by the patent thicket and by hold-up rather than exacerbating them.

Enterprise Restructuring in Transition: A Quantitative Survey

Abstract: We survey the empirical literature analyzing the process of enterprise restructuring in transition economies. The survey provides new insights into the relative effectiveness of different reform policies, and into how this effectiveness varies across regions. We study the effects of privatization, the importance of different types of owners, the effects of foreign and domestic competition, the consequences of soft budgets, and the role of managerial incentives and managerial human capital, on enterprise restructuring.