This paper attempts to provide an analytical framework to analyze organizational forms in the knowledge economy. We first outline some historical trends that have transformed the organization of production over the last few decades. We show that this transformation has taken place not only in...

The unprecedented development of intellectual property rights (both in scale and scope) has been one of the most important factors in the transformation of the world economy over the last three decades. We argue that, at least in part, economic importance of knowledge has brought an overreaching...

F/OSS software has been described by many as a puzzle. In the past five years, it has stimulated the curiosity of scholars in a variety of fields, including economics, law, psychology, anthropology and computer science, so that the number of contributions on the subject has increased...

Like land before the industrial revolution, much knowledge is being enclosed in private hands. These enclosures have become a major factor in specialization among firms and among countries: both are forced to specialize in the fields that are not restricted by the enclosures of the others. This...

This article analyzes the effects on ex ante incentives to invest in the development of complementary innovations of two alternative appropriability strategies: a strategy of exclusion of third parties from access (through active enforcement of IPRs or technical means) vis-a-vis an openness...

In standard neoclassical theory a double neutrality holds: the nature of the technical assets employed in production does not influence property rights and vice versa the property right structure does not influence the technology adopted by the organization. However, empirical evidence shows...

The organization of information production is undergoing a deep transformation. Alongside media corporations, which have been for long time the predominant institutions of information production, new organizational forms have emerged, e.g. free software communities, open-content on-line wikis,...

This article aims at clarifying the role played by licenses within the increasingly relevant Open Source Software (OSS) phenomenon. In particular, the article explores from a theoretical point of view the comparative properties of the two main categories of OSS license--copyleft and non-copyleft...

This paper studies the relationship between trademarks and economic activity. We compare the distribution of product classes across national, EU, and international trademarks deposited by Italian firms. In relation to EU trademarks, we analyze some characteristics of the deposits of major...

This paper explores the interface between two important institutional pillars of market exchange – Intellectual Property (IP) law and Antitrust law – in light of a theory of property rights incompleteness. This theory interprets property as an incomplete bundle of both defined and undefined...