Risk attitudes, patenting and invention disclosures by academic researchers

This paper examines the effect of risk attitudes on innovation behavior of academic researchers. Specifically, using two alternate measures of self-reported risk attitudes, we test the hypothesis that aversion to risk would negatively affect revelation of information in innovations. Results based on a sample of more than 2500 German researchers across both measures of risk aversion show that, consistent with intuition, risk aversion has a significant negative effect on invention disclosures, but not on patenting.