Intermediaries in the U.S. Market for Technology, 1870-1920
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We argue that the emergence of a well-developed market for patented technologies over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries facilitated the emergence of a group of highly specialized and productive inventors by making it possible for them to transfer to others responsibility for developing and commercializing their inventions.The most basic of the institutional supports that made this market possible was, of course, the patent system, which created secure and tradable property rights in invention.But trade was also facilitated by the emergence of intermediaries who economized on the information costs associated with assessing the value of inventions and helped to match sellers and buyers of patent rights.Patent agents and lawyers were particularly well placed to provide these kinds of services, because they were linked to similar attorneys in other parts of the country and because, in the course of their regular business activities, they accumulated information about participants on both sides of the market for technology.Our quantitative analysis of assignment contracts demonstrates that patentees whose assignments were handled by these specialists produced more patents over their careers, assigned a greater fraction of their patents, and also were able to find buyers for their inventions much more quickly than other patentees.In other words, the development of institutions supporting market trade in patented technology seems to have made it possible for creative individuals to specialize more fully in inventive work --that is, it seems to have set in motion the kind of Smithian processes that have generally been associated with higher rates of productivity growth.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".