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on Technology and Industrial Dynamics |
| By: | Anderson, Benjamin; Sheldon, Ian |
| Abstract: | Over the past three decades, the agricultural biotechnology sector has been characterized by rapid innovation, market consolidation, and a more exhaustive definition of property rights. The industry attributes consistently identified by the literature and important to this analysis include: (i) endogenous sunk costs in the form of expenditures on R&D; (ii) seed and agricultural chemical technologies that potentially act as complements within firms and substitutes across firms; and (iii) property rights governing plant and seed varieties that have become more clearly defined since the 1970s. This paper adds to the stylized facts of the agricultural biotechnology industry to include the ability of firms to license technology, a phenomenon observed only recently in the market as licensing was previously precluded by high transactions costs and âanti-stackingâ provisions. We extend Suttonâs theoretical framework of endogenous sunk costs and market structure to incorporate the ability of firms to license technology under well-defined property rights, an observed characteristic not captured in previous analyses of the sector. Our model implies that technology licensing leads to lower levels of industry concentration then what would be found under Suttonâs model, but that industry concentration remains bounded away from perfect competition as market size becomes large. |
| Keywords: | licensing, market structure, R&D, agricultural biotechnology, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, L22, L24, Q16, |
| Date: | 2011 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:aaea11:107832&r=tid |
| By: | James Bessen (Research on Innovation, Boston University School of Law, Berkman Center for Internet and Society (Harvard)) |
| Abstract: | This report examines changes in the patenting behavior of the software industry since the 1990s. It finds that most software firms still do not patent, most software patents are obtained by a few large firms in the software industry or in other industries, and the risk of litigation from software patents continues to increase dramatically. Given these findings, it is hard to conclude that software patents have provided a net social benefit in the software industry. |
| Keywords: | patents, software, software patents, litigation, innovation, startup firms |
| JEL: | O34 D23 L86 |
| Date: | 2011 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:roi:wpaper:1102&r=tid |
| By: | Gallini, Nancy |
| Abstract: | Inventors and users of technology often enter into cooperative agreements for sharing their intellectual property in order to implement a standard or to avoid costly litigation. Over the past two decades, U.S. antitrust authorities have viewed pooling arrangements that integrate complementary, valid and essential patents as having procompetitive benefits in reducing prices, transactions costs, and the incidence of legal suits. Since patent pools are cooperative agreements, they also have the potential of suppressing competition if, for example, they harbor weak or invalid patents, dampen incentives to conduct research on innovations that compete with the pooled patents, foreclose competition from downstream product or upstream input markets, or raise prices on goods that compete with the pooled patents. In synthesizing the ideas advanced in the economic literature, this paper explores whether these antitrust concerns apply to pools with complementary patents and, if they do, the implications for competition policy to constrain them. Special attention is given to the application of the U.S. Department of Justiceâ€Federal Trade Commission Guidelines for the Licensing of Intellectual Property (1995) and its companion Antitrust Enforcement and Intellectual Property Rights: Promoting Innovation and Competition (2007) to recent patent pool cases. |
| Keywords: | patents, patent pools, intellectual property |
| JEL: | O31 O34 |
| Date: | 2011–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uca:ucaiel:5&r=tid |
| By: | Bagchi, Aniruddha; Roy, Abhra |
| Abstract: | The incentive of providing protection of intellectual property has been analyzed, both for an emerging economy as well as for a developed economy. The optimal patent length and the optimal patent breadth within a country are found to be positively related to each other for a fixed structure of laws abroad. Moreover, a country can respond to stronger patent protection abroad by weakening its patent protection under certain circumstances and by strengthening its patent protection under other circumstances. These results depend upon the curvature of the R&D production function. Finally, we investigate the impact of an increase in the willingness-to-pay in the emerging economy and find conditions under which there is an improvement in both patent length as well as patent breadth in the emerging economy. |
| Keywords: | Patent Length; Patent Breadth; Productivity |
| JEL: | F20 O34 O31 |
| Date: | 2011–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:31822&r=tid |