A prize system that supplements patents will have greater benefits
Abramowicz 03 (Michael B. Abramowicz has a JD from Yale Law School and is the Associate Dean for Strategy and Innovation; Oppenheim Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School, “Perfecting Patent Prizes,” “GW Law: Scholarly Commons: GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works,” URL: https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1203&context=faculty_publications, Circa 2003)//NTG
So far, I have developed a prize system that is likely to be both simpler to implement and more flexible than the prize proposals that other commentators have offered. In addition, the Article has shown that establishing a prize fund as an adjunct to the patent system is likely to have greater benefits than costs, especially because a relatively small fund will tend to induce actions with the highest ratio of social benefit to private cost.584 This conclusion, however, leaves much unanswered, especially given the argument that it may be better to adopt a prize system for a specific purpose than for patents or intellectual property in general. 585 Even a modest prize fund experiment seems more likely to come as a response to a specific need than from a generalized desire to tweak our intellectual property institutions. This Part describes several potential applications from a wide range of possibilities, with two principal considerations dictating the choice of examples. First, the examples all reflect current controversies and problems, illustrating how prize systems might be used to address specific issues of contemporary concern. Second, and more importantly, each of the examples presents different challenges, showing both the potential flexibility of prize systems and how they might be modified depending on the purposes for which they are used.