Members of a patent pool agree to use a set of patents as if they were jointly owned by all members and license them as a package to other firms. Regulators favor pools as a means to encourage innovation: Pools are expected to reduce litigation risks for their members and lower license fees and...

Leniency programmes (or policies) reduce sanctions against cartel members that self-report to the Antitrust Authority. We focus on their ability to directly deter cartels and analogous criminal organizations by undermining internal trust, increasing individual incentives to ‘cheat’ on...

Bargaining sequences, though vital to the real-world business strategies, are often treated as exogenously given. We examine bargaining sequences in the setting where a downstream firm makes a merger decision with an upstream partner and faces a negotiation with a union. When the downstream...

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,...

We highlight conditions under which R&D agreements may harm consumers by increasing final prices. This occurs although members of the R&D agreement increase their R&D efforts. We focus on cases where firms compete both on the final market and to buy an input necessary for R&D. The market is...

This paper discusses ways of strengthening the competitive environment in order to help boost productivity performance in various sectors of the Danish economy. It looks at a number of indicators of the strength of competition — including price levels, industrial concentration and product...