Misallocation of scientific credit: the role of hierarchy and preferences. An extension of Lissoni et al. (2013)

Abstract

Abstract We extend the results in Lissoni et al. (2013, J. Econ. Behav. Organ., 95, 49–69) on scientific credit misallocation, as measured by misalignment between authorship and inventorship recognition in patent-publication pairs. Extending the analysis to European data, we confirm that, other things being equal, the probability of exclusion of a scientific author from a publication-related patent declines with seniority and increases for women. In addition, we find that the senior scientists’ power to exclude other authors plays a more important role in explaining the patterns of exclusion than differences in authors’ attribution preferences. The unfavorable treatment of young and/or female scientists emerges in particular when patents are owned by companies or individuals, thus providing a warning flag on those institutional arrangements that favor company or individual ownership of academic patents.