This paper focuses on the class of legal rules that governs intellectual property rights: the antitrust limits imposed on patent settlements. The paper discusses the benefits and costs of settlements and explains why antitrust limits on settlements are needed to prevent abuse of the settlement...

Passage of the Sherman Act in the United States in 1890 set the stage for a century of jurisprudence regarding monopoly, cartels, and oligopoly. Among American statutes that regulate commerce, the Sherman Act is unequaled in its generality. The Act outlawed "every contract, combination or...

Three years ago, the Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission revised their Horizontal Merger Guidelines to articulate in greater detail how they would treat claims of efficiencies associated with horizontal mergers: claims that are frequently made, as for instance in the recently...

After an investigation lasting several months, in June 1998 the Federal Trade Commission brought an antitrust lawsuit against Intel Corporation based on Intel's conduct towards Intergraph, and similar conduct towards Digital Equipment Corporation and Compaq, all in the context of disputes where...

In several key industries, including semiconductors, biotechnology, computer software, and the Internet, our patent system is creating a patent thicket: an overlapping set of patent rights requiring that those seeking to commercialize new technology obtain licenses from multiple patentees. The...

I consider the private provision of public goods in two stage games. If the agent who likes the public good least contributes first, the amount of the public good supplied will be the same as in the Nash equilibrium. If the agent who likes the public good most contributes first, less of the...

This paper was prepared for the conference ``Public Access to the Internet,'' JFK School of Government, May 26--27 , 1993. We describe some of the technology and costs relevant to pricing access to and usage of the Internet, and discuss the components of an efficient pricing structure. We...

This is a preliminary version of a paper prepared for the Tenth Michigan Public Utility Conference at Western Michigan University March 25--27, 1992. We describe the history, technology and cost structure of the Internet. We also describe a possible smart-market mechanism for pricing traffic on...

I examine the incentives for software providers to design appropriate user interfaces. There are two sorts of costs involved when one uses software: the fixed cost of learning to use a piece of software and the the variable cost of operating the software. For example menu driven software is easy...