Uploaded November 2021 | Updated September 2026, 3 days ago
Yale University, November 11, 2021
The 2021 annual Global Justice Program conference (GJPAC'21)
Supported by the Yale Global Justice Program, Academics Stand Against Poverty and Incentives for Global Health.
It features a session with the winners of the Eighth Annual Amartya Sen Essay Prize Competition.
Apart from this, much of this year’s event is devoted to exploring incentives and rewards for creating and delivering innovations. Globalized in 1995 through the TRIPs Agreement, humanity’s dominant mechanism for encouraging innovations involves 20-year product patents, whose monopoly features enable innovators to reap markups or licensing fees from early users. This mechanism leads innovators to ignore the needs specific to poor people, who cannot afford to pay large markups; and it also tends to exclude the poor from marketed innovations that are still under patent. In addition, monopoly patents are insufficiently sensitive to externalities — they under-reward, for example, benefits enjoyed by parties other than an innovation’s buyers and users, resulting in massive underinvestment in R&D of green technologies.
Arguably, these problems can be much alleviated by adding a second reward option. This might be a class of domain-specific supplementary alternative mechanisms featuring fixed annual reward pools to be divided among participating innovations according to the social impact achieved with each. Innovations registered for such impact rewards would have to be sold at or below variable cost. An international Health Impact Fund in the pharmaceutical sector, for instance, would create powerful new incentives to develop remedies against diseases concentrated among the poor, rapidly to provide such remedies with ample care at very low prices, and to deploy them strategically to contain, suppress, and ideally to eradicate the target disease. Analogously, a Green Impact Fund for Technology would create powerful new incentives to develop, and to supply at highly competitive prices, new technologies that avert and reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. By promoting innovations and their diffusion together, impact funds might greatly enlarge the benefits of innovation, especially to the poor, and thereby also its cost-effectiveness.
More info on: https://globaljustice.yale.edu/
Yale University, November 11, 2021
The 2021 annual Global Justice Program conference (GJPAC'21)
Supported by the Yale Global Justice Program, Academics Stand Against Poverty and Incentives for Global Health.
It features a session with the winners of the Eighth Annual Amartya Sen Essay Prize Competition.
Apart from this, much of this year’s event is devoted to exploring incentives and rewards for creating and delivering innovations. Globalized in 1995 through the TRIPs Agreement, humanity’s dominant mechanism for encouraging innovations involves 20-year product patents, whose monopoly features enable innovators to reap markups or licensing fees from early users. This mechanism leads innovators to ignore the needs specific to poor people, who cannot afford to pay large markups; and it also tends to exclude the poor from marketed innovations that are still under patent. In addition, monopoly patents are insufficiently sensitive to externalities — they under-reward, for example, benefits enjoyed by parties other than an innovation’s buyers and users, resulting in massive underinvestment in R&D of green technologies.
Arguably, these problems can be much alleviated by adding a second reward option. This might be a class of domain-specific supplementary alternative mechanisms featuring fixed annual reward pools to be divided among participating innovations according to the social impact achieved with each. Innovations registered for such impact rewards would have to be sold at or below variable cost. An international Health Impact Fund in the pharmaceutical sector, for instance, would create powerful new incentives to develop remedies against diseases concentrated among the poor, rapidly to provide such remedies with ample care at very low prices, and to deploy them strategically to contain, suppress, and ideally to eradicate the target disease. Analogously, a Green Impact Fund for Technology would create powerful new incentives to develop, and to supply at highly competitive prices, new technologies that avert and reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. By promoting innovations and their diffusion together, impact funds might greatly enlarge the benefits of innovation, especially to the poor, and thereby also its cost-effectiveness.
More info on: https://globaljustice.yale.edu/
