Risk attitudes, patenting and invention disclosures by academic researchers

摘要

This paper examines the effect of risk attitudes on innovation behavior of academic researchers. Specifically, using two alternate measures of self-reported risk attitudes, we test the hypothesis that aversion to risk would negatively affect revelation of information in innovations. Results based on a sample of more than 2500 German researchers across both measures of risk aversion show that, consistent with intuition, risk aversion has a significant negative effect on invention disclosures, but not on patenting.