We explore conditions under which collaboration between pharmaceutical firms from 'advanced' and emerging countries becomes preferable to rivalry. We show that that when agreements, such as Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (IP) Rights, allow advanced country firms to take legal...

Edith Penrose's tightly argued classic laid the foundations for the resource based view of the firm, now the dominant framework in business strategy She analyses managerial activities and decisions, organizational routines, and also the factors that inevitably limit a firm's growth prospects....

The prospect theory of patents views patents as a tool for development and commercialization of inventions. Prospect patents rely on broad control of a technology so that rivalry between competing products is diminished thus avoiding waste of common pool resources. The theory has been widely...

The impact of IP protection on the innovation incentives of startup firms is examined in a dynamic model where an incumbent faces a sequence of potential startups and the incumbent's chance of winning an infringement lawsuit increases with the size of its patent portfolio. It is shown that...

Patents act as an incentive to innovate. However, as this paper argues, patents can lead the patent holder to rest on his laurels and at the same time discourage some innovators from innovating, reducing knowledge spillovers. The combined result of the above suggests an inverse U relationship...

This paper introduces the idea that strong patent protection can lead innovators to rest on their laurels, into a simple tournament based framework. Concentrating on optimal patent protection, the one that maximizes production, the model shows that there is a positive relationship between the...

We analyse the hitherto unexplored relationship between intra-firm conflict between the research and development (R&D) department and central management, conflict alleviation and the choice of ‘open’ versus ‘closed’ innovation, in the context of a simple formal model. We find that in the...