Creative Production and Exchange of Ideas
Abstract
This paper explores the relationship between individual creative productivity and learning about
ideas of others. I report evidence from a two-stage real-effort lab experiment, in which subjects perform ideageneration tasks. In the first stage some subjects observe creative output of other players, while the others
not. This design makes possible to assess whether learning ideas of others is an important input for idea
generation and quantify its importance. In the second stage, I make ideas costly and study the subjects’
willingness to pay for them. I compare the costs of ideas to the expected monetary benefits from increased
creative productivity and characterize investment behavior of the subjects. The results show that observing
output of others boosts productivity in creative tasks, but only when it shows truly new, previously unknown
by the subject items. When ideas of others become costly, I find that the subjects do not act in a profitmaximizing way. To minimize the costs they choose to see the ideas of less creative players, which usually do
not contribute many original items. As a result, the participants get less than optimum benefits. This effect is
more pronounced for subjects of lower creative ability, more risk-averse or self-confident participants and
females. In aggregate, such behavior does not lead to the highest possible level of creative production. These
findings make an argument for policies that encourage exchange of information at a workplace (e.g.
teamwork, workshops) and at the same time show the need for oversight, central planning of collaborative
activities or other actions that may help to creative professionals to invest efficiently, when access to ideas of
others is costly.
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