The hospital industry could be characterised on the one hand as under “industrial constraints” (just in time, 24 hours opening, and on the other hand as a service activity with, in departments, a high degree of patient oriented activities. Very similar pressure are exerted on hospitals in...

The contemporary tensions between patents and competition no longer reside in the traditional trade-off between the exclusionary right given to an inventor to encourage innovation, and the welfare loss induced by the market power associated to this right. They rather result from three important...

Council Regulation (EC) 1/2003 came into force in May 2004 and replaced the mandatory notification of agreements by a regime of ex post monitoring. This paper shows that ex post monitoring is the optimal audit regime when the competition authority's probability of error is low. On the other...

We consider an oligopolistic industry including leveraged firms and unleveraged ones where firms are engaged in a sequential decision-making process. At the first stage of the game, a firm and her bank, considering the demand uncertainty and the distribution probability of the shock, evaluate a...

Patent pools are cooperative agreements between several patent owners to bundle the sale of their respective licenses. In this paper we analyze their consequences on the speed of the innovation process. We adopt an ex ante perspective and study the impact of possible pool formation on the...