Protection of Intellectual Property Rights and Competition Policy: Seeking for a Better Balance

Competition policy and intellectual property rights (IPR) protection policy play a significant role in the innovation-based economic development. The authors of this work consider different combinations of these policies through the lens of discrete structural alternatives assuming opportunities for different regimes of IPR protection, as well as for antitrust. The analysis is focused on 4 main alternatives: strong and weak IPR protection, on the one hand, and two types of competition policy, based on a possible introduction of compulsory licensing, on the other hand. The result of the analysis shows that the introduction of compulsory licensing under a weak IPR protection weakens incentives for innovations.