"Eric S. Maskin has just been awarded the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, often called Nobel Prize in Economics. [...] But Eric S. Maskin may be known to readers of this blog for another reason. He is the co-author of the landmark 2000 Bessen-Maskin paper on the relationship between sequential innovation, patents and investment in R&D. This work played a significant role in the debate on software patents as it pioneered a series of work that demonstrated that far from acting as a R&D incentive, patents act as a disincentive in domains where incremental innovation is important (such as software)..."