Post-grant validity challenges at patent offices rely on the private initiative of third parties to correct mistakes made by patent offices. We hypothesize that incentives to bring post-grant validity challenges are reduced when many firms benefit from revocation of a patent and when firms are...

This Paper analyses the interaction between internal capital market allocations and product market competition. It is argued that diversification and divestiture are both rational responses to anticipated changes in the competitive environment. Diversification is the optimal response to an...

We investigate incidence and evolution of patent thickets. Our empirical analysis is based on a theoretical model of patenting in complex and discrete technologies. The model captures how competition for patent portfolios and complementarity of patents affect patenting incentives. We show that...

Using a general two-stage framework, this paper gives sufficient conditions for increasing competition to have negative or positive effects on R&D-investment, respectively. Both possibilities arise in plausible situations, even if one uses relatively narrow definitions of increasing competition....

We consider a bargaining model of the interaction between a government and interest groups in which, unlike existing models, neither side is assumed to have all the bargaining power. The government will then find it optimal to constrain itself in the use of transfer policies to improve its...

The paper analyses a situation in which negotiations take place between a party consisting of a single decision-maker and a party consisting of a group of two decision-makers. The latter, in setting its proposal to the opponent party, may act cooperatively or non-cooperatively within itself. The...

This paper empirically investigates the effects of the US safeguard protection on steel imports in 2002 on the mark-ups of EU steel producers. We identify a large panel of EU steel producers between 1995 and 2005 affected by the safeguards. Using the Roeger methodology, our results show that the...

We show that the nature and extent of trade is significantly affected by the pricing policy that firms are allowed to employ. A switch from discriminatory to non-discriminatory pricing (e.g. strict anti-dumping laws) leads to a switch from two-way trade to one-way trade. It is far from true that...

This paper empirically tests the effects of Anti-Dumping (AD) protection on the price-cost margin of firms. To this end, we use a rich panel data set of 1,666 EU producers that were involved in AD cases initiated in 1996. Our findings indicate that price-cost margins in most cases significantly...