alt Hacker NewsThe book goes into quite a bit of depth if it is a topic that interests you.
I would flag that we’re getting into “prove a negative” territory here: the goalpost is that we need to prove empirically that patents achieve the desired outcome. If the scenario you describe accounts for all game-theory/incentive/complex-adaptive-system universes, we should see this reflected in the data.
When it comes to pharmaceuticals, they looked into Italy and Switzerland who switched to a patent system in 1978 (and I believe Portugal in the 1990s). They looked at the growth curves of things like # of inventions, total factor productivity, percentage R&D spending, and the conclusion was that there was no statistically significant change in trajectory that would suggest the introduction of the patents had any positive effects. (Edit: they accounted for domestic/international + US filings before/after as well).
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Thanks for actually giving a great answer to this versus the other knee-jerk comments! I will definitely look into this more.
I think it's important to note that the cost of bringing a drug to market has increased a lot (about threefold) since 1990, so if the case studies are that old they might not generalize.
I think the "prove a negative" idea is a bit silly, my common sense says that the patent system should work better so if it doesn't, somebody's going to have to extensively prove it to me or show me a clear mechanism as to why it doesn't.
I could read a book on it but Italy/Switzerland (combined ~5-10% of drug discovery) making changes 60 years ago doesn't get me too excited about updating my priors.