نوآوری و فن آوری ناشی از مسیر : شواهد از محصولات ترک سیگار

Economic theory predicts that policies that discourage the consumption of a particular good will induce innovation in a socially desirable substitute. However, the literature on technology trajectories emphasizes the possibility of innovation waves associated with the identification of new dominant designs. We incorporate both of these possibilities in a model of the invention of new smoking cessation products, based on a new dataset of patents on such products from 1951 to 2004. We find that an increase in cigarette tax levels had no discernible impact on the industry-wide rate of invention in smoking cessation products. However, we do find evidence consistent with the emergence of dominant designs having substantial positive innovation effects. We estimate that the introduction of the nicotine gum and patch increased the overall rate of patenting activity in smoking cessation products by 60–75%, subject to a 10% rate of decay. Finally, we show that these products had greater effects on the patenting of corporations than individual inventors.

Cigarette smoking is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), smoking is responsible for approximately one in five deaths annually, or about 443,000 deaths per year. In the last several decades, technology has provided effective and affordable ways for addicted smokers to “break the habit.” Smoking cessation products, mainly comprised of nicotine replacement therapies, have been at least partially responsible for a decrease in smoking rates from more than 42% to less than 20% of American adults over the past forty years. More generally, there are numerous public policy problems for which new technology is important. The most prominent of these is global climate change, where it seems clear that significant damage will be avoided at reasonable economic cost only if new low-carbon or carbon-free technologies can be deployed at massive scale. There is currently an active debate as to whether and how public policy might foster the desired innovation. The literature on induced innovation provides an explicit framework to consider the mechanisms by which specific policies might increase the rate of innovation in particular areas, but there is relatively little empirical work documenting the significance of different factors in different contexts. We consider the public health problem of smoking and the development of cessation products as a case study that may inform the larger question of how to induce the innovation of socially desirable technologies. We recognize that technological and market options vary across industries, and therefore offer these findings only as elements of a larger research agenda on the sources of technological change, not as bearing in any direct way on policy choices in other contexts. The body of this paper will be organized as follows. Section 2 explores public policy as a source for induced innovation. Section 3 introduces two hypotheses about the rate of innovation for smoking cessation products from the economics literature on innovation and technology trajectories. Section 4 describes the quantitative and qualitative data used in this empirical study. Section 5 outlines our model specification and estimation strategy, while Section 6 discusses the results of our empirical analysis. Finally, Section 7 summarizes our argument and draws conclusions about the causal link between the rules of the market and the marketplace of ideas.

The purpose of this study was to explore the determinants of the rate of invention in a socially desirable technology. We investigated whether a policy that discouraged the use of an existing technology induced socially desirable innovation with respect to alternatives. In this particular case, we were unable to find empirical evidence that cigarette taxes affected the rate of innovation for new smoking cessation products. This is perhaps unsurprising given that inflation-adjusted taxes fell for much of the sample period, even as awareness of the smoking issue was growing. We did find that attributes of the technology trajectory for smoking cessation products appear to have affected the pace of invention. The introduction of the first nicotine gum and the first nicotine patch appear to have had positive effects on the rate of innovation in the smoking cessation industry. These dominant design events were the most robust and important effects throughout the empirical analysis. We embedded the recursive evolutionary algorithm of differentiation, selection, and amplification in our technology-trajectory variables by giving them an impulse/decay form over time, so these effects faded over time. Of course, the emergence of these designs was not itself exogenous, but the discontinuities they seem to have introduced into the innovation process were important and therefore worthy of analysis. We hope that these findings will stimulate further efforts to incorporate technology-trajectory variables in empirical research. From a policy perspective, our results suggest that at least in this particular case, an important determinant of smoking cessation product innovation was the innovation process itself. In order to successfully induce future socially desirable innovation, the challenge may be to find a way to generate new dominant designs. Further research could explore exactly what happened in 1984 and 1992 when the nicotine gum and patch were developed and try to understand what role external factors, including public policy, may have played in triggering these developments. We do not find support for an innovation-inducement effect from Pigouvian taxes in this case. But, of course, failure to find support is not the same as proving there is no such effect. Perhaps it was unlikely to find such effects for taxes that were not viewed as a policy instrument of this sort, whose levels were not set for this purpose, and where the linkage between the diminished demand for cigarettes and an increased demand for smoking cessation devices added an additional possible diminution of effect. With respect to current political discourse around excise taxes on soda and junk food, and carbon taxes to address climate change, we do not have specific policy advice from this research. However, the significance of the technology-trajectory variables is suggestive of a possible need to consider the technology-evolution side of the process in addition to the demand-pull side through which Piguovian taxes operate. If it is true generally that the invention rate depends on the introduction of transformative inventions, then technology policy aimed at specific policy objectives needs to be founded on an understanding of the sources of those transformative inventions. For example, the development of digital computing and semiconductor technology was seeded in important ways by government purchases of early devices for military and space purposes; current commercial applications would not likely have emerged or developed as quickly without the effects on the technology trajectory initiated by these non-market government policies (Mowery, 2011). If society desires to nudge innovation in particular directions, then it may be important to understand how policy can exploit the dynamic of technology trajectories.