Software is a potentially excludable public good. It is possible, at some cost, to exclude non-paying users from its consumption by using copyright law or technological restraints. Licensing the software under proprietary license terms makes of it a private good, licensing it under the BSD does...

Using a sample of fisheries managed under the Magnuson Act, a probit model of the probability of property rights adoption is estimated. The probability of adoption increases as ex–vessel revenue increases and as proxies for transaction costs decrease.

The role of intellectual property (IP) as an important value determinant is widely recognized. This article tries to quantify the role of IP in companies valuation by comparing a sample of biotechnology companies (46 companies included in the Genetic Engineering News Index:GEN-Dex) to the...

The Washington Consensus suffers from fundamental inadequacies, and that a more comprehensive framework of the economic process is needed to guide the formulation of country-specific development strategies. The following five propositions summarise the set of interrelated arguments made in this...

This paper analyzes the optimal choice of pricing schedules and technological deterrence levels in a market with digital piracy, when legal sellers can sometimes control the extent of piracy by implementing digital rights management (DRM) systems. It is shown that the seller's optimal pricing...

The Washington Consensus suffers from fundamental inadequacies, and that a more comprehensive framework of the economic process is needed to guide the formulation of country-specific development strategies. The following five propositions summarise the set of interrelated arguments made in this...

Intellectual Property Intensity (IPI) measures the weight of IP in the firm’s total market value. IPI has a positive (convex) functional relationship with Price to Book (P/B) ratio, and thus may provide additional economic insight to the empirical value-growth effect. Growth firms have higher...

Conviction rates in Japan exceed 99 percent -- why? On the one hand, because Japanese prosecutors are badly understaffed they may prosecute only their strongest cases and present judges only with the most obviously guilty defendants. On the other, because Japanese judges can be reassigned by the...

In this paper we explain the prevalence of explicit contracts of employment, particularly those that embody high- rather than low-powered incentives and clauses that supersede the common law defaults. Our analysis is based on an understanding of two fundamental problems that arise when agency...