Confidential know-how sharing and trade-secrets laws: Studying the interaction between legality, social norms and justice among high-tech employees in Silicon Valley (California).

摘要

In this project I study the behavioral processes underlying knowledge workers' attitudes toward conflicting social and legal requirements in the workplace. The project takes an experimental approach to the study of social norms in the context of the divulgence of trade secrets in Silicon Valley. The project's empirical findings are based, for the most part, on data collected from a non-random multi-sourced sample of 260 high tech employees in Silicon Valley. The goal of the project is to offer a behavioral account for a reported culture of high mobility of employees among competitors which, according to some, has led to a relatively high number of trade-secrets violations. On a broader theoretical level the objective of the project is to contribute to the growing research conducted by both law and economics and law and society scholars, wherein social norms are conceived as substitute and/or complementary sources of enforcement. By randomly assigning 'realistically stylized vignettes' to a sample of employees in the industry, I attempt to bridge the extant gap between qualitative fieldwork, which tends to be rich but interpretive, and game-based experiments, which tend to be rigorous but constrained by limited external validity. On a policy level, the empirical and theoretical inquiries aim to identify the ideal balance of formal and informal trade-secrets enforcement in a regime in which employee mobility and information diffusion are perceived by many as being innovative and important. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)