Blockchain and the Evolution of Institutional Technologies: Implications for Innovation Policy

Research Policy, Volume 49, Issue 1, February 2020. With Darcy WE Allen, Brendan Markey-Towler, Mikayla Novak, and Jason Potts

Abstract: For the past century economists have proposed a suite of theories relating to industrial dynamics, technological change and innovation. There has been an implication in these models that the institutional environment is stable. However, a new class of institutional technologies — most notably blockchain technology — lower the cost of institutional entrepreneurship along these margins, propelling a process of institutional evolution. This presents a new type of innovation process, applicable to the formation and development of institutions for economic governance and coordination. This paper develops a replicator dynamic model of institutional innovation and proposes some implications of this innovation for innovation policy. Given the influence of public policies on transaction costs and associated institutional choices, it is indicated that policy settings conductive to the adoption and use of blockchain technology would elicit entrepreneurial experiments in institutional forms harnessing new coordinative possibilities in economic exchange. Conceptualisation of blockchain-related public policy an innovation policy in its own right has significant implications for the operation and understanding of open innovation systems in a globalised context.

Available at Research Policy. Accepted version available at SSRN.

Some Economic Consequences of the GDPR

With Darcy Allen, Alastair Berg, Brendan Markey-Towler, and Jason Potts. Published in Economics Bulletin, Volume 39, Issue 2, pages 785-797. Originally a Medium post.

Abstract: The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a wide ranging personal data protection regime of greater magnitude than any similar regulation previously in the EU, or elsewhere. In this paper, we outline how the GDPR impacts the value of data held by data collectors before proposing some potential unintended consequences. Given the distortions of the GDPR on data value, we propose that new complex financial products—essentially new data insurance markets—will emerge, potentially leading to further systematic risks. Finally we examine how market-driven solutions to the data property rights problems the GDPR seeks to solve—particularly using blockchain technology as economic infrastructure for data rights—might be less distortionary.

Available here.