F
ilm is an intensely collaborative medium.The great examples of that art form—Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Annie Hall, Pulp Fiction—were the result of dozens of people working together. The literary novel, by contrast, is the preserve of a solitary author. From Moby Dick to The Great Gatsby to Infinite Jest—all the great novels were produced by a single person working alone.Why?
Part of the answer lies at the intersection of economic theory and intellectual property law. Economists generally view the market and its price mechanism as the most efficient way to allocate resources. But most people, most of the time, don’t use explicit price mechanisms or ordinary market transactions to decide every detail of their work. Instead, employees
accept a total payment for their at-will employment, and then talk to their bosses and coworkers to figure out who will be responsible for fulfilling a client’s order or restocking the shelves. The team production theory of the firm—a branch of economic theory that grew from Ronald Coase’s landmark article The Nature of the Firm—offers one explanation for why bosses don’t put a price on each task that an employee performs. For some productive activity, the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts, and it will be hard to sort out how much of the total output each individual employee contributed. Four problems characterizing these scenarios make market mechanisms inadequate for eliciting good work. Observation. Participants cannot easily know whether their teammates are doing less than their fair share. Imagine Paul McCartney trying to determine whether John Lennon was keeping his best lyrics for his solo work; how could he know for sure? Verification. Even if the participants can tell whether their teammates are doing enough, it would be hard to prove it to an outsider, like a court. McCartney would have a hard time suing Lennon for violating a contract in which Lennon promised to contribute the best lyrics he could think of to their collaboration. Nonseparability. The total value of the team’s output cannot be assigned to the individual contributions of each of the inputs. How much did the Beatles owe their success to McCartney or Lennon, or George Harrison for that matter (Ringo, as always, will be left for the parenthetical aside)? Uncertainty. The total potential output is hard to predict in advance. Most of those who saw the Beatles
IN N OVA TIV E FA CUL TY
Collaboration, Creativity, and Copyright
Innovative Faculty
ANDRES Sawicki
SMARTTAKES
BY PROFESSOR ANDRES SAWICKI
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