Organizing Information Sharing – Some Insights from Economics

This paper focuses on sharing of information during the innovation process. Many of the questions raised by the organization of firms and markets for innovation have been analyzed in economics, and a first goal of the paper is to show how previous work in industrial organization about patent pools, Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs) and public-private partnerships (PPPs) may provide guidance on the costs and benefits of different ways to organize information sharing among firms subject to regulatory approval. A second goal is to highlight how the recent developments in the market for innovative medicine leads to novel questions for economists, both for the industrial organization structure of the market and the organization of firms and markets.