There was no effect on R&D.
Timothy Simcoe & Filippo Mezzanotti 18, received his A.B. in Applied Math and Economics from Harvard University, and an M.A. in Economics and Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of California at Berkeley, Associate Professor of Finance. His research interests are in empirical corporate finance, innovation and entrepreneurship, 6/7/18, Technology and Policy, “Patent Policy and American Innovation after eBay: An Empirical Examination”, https://sites.bu.edu/tpri/2018/06/07/patent-policy-and-american-innovation-after-ebay-an-empirical-examination/, kcab
They also found no effect on R&D spending. R&D spending reflects only the inputs to innovation, i.e., money spent to support innovative efforts, but a slowdown or decline in R&D spending growth after eBay could indicate a reduction in those efforts. Simcoe and Mezzanotti found no decrease in spending immediately after eBay, and, indeed, after the expected drop during the Great Recession, R&D spending took off, which suggests that the overall economic climate has a much stronger influence on R&D spending than patent policy. They also examined venture-capital spending as a proxy for innovation in startups, to see if they experienced any effects from eBay, and found that, if anything, startup funding, and in the computing industry in particular, increased dramatically after eBay. While there is no way to know if the increase would have been even more dramatic absent eBay, their findings are “consistent with the idea that intellectual property is less important for driving investments in innovation” than other factors, like demand.
Simcoe and Mezzanotti also examined productivity, “which measures the total economic value created for a given level of resources used in production.” Productivity growth in the U.S. has slowed compared to the late 1990s, and there is “robust ongoing debate” about its causes. Although eBay is not likely to be a cause of the slowdown because it often takes decades for significant inventions to have an impact on productivity, Simcoe and Mezzanotti nevertheless analyzed productivity for seventeen manufacturing industries in the period 2000-2011. They found that the computing industry had the fastest productivity growth both before and after eBay, which is expected, given the rapid improvements associated with Moore’s law. Further analysis showed that productivity actually increased for patent-intensive industries (such as computing) after eBay, and there was no change in productivity growth rate across all industries for that same period.
Although innovation can be difficult to measure, and any changes in policy may take years if not decades to manifest in the data, there is as yet no indication that eBay harmed innovation.