The new field of judgment aggregation aims to find collective judgments on logically interconnected propositions. Recent impossibility results establish limitations on the possibility to vote independently on the propositions. I show that, fortunately, the impossibility results do not apply to a...

Cumulative innovation is central to economic growth. Do patent rights facilitate or impede such follow-on innovation? This paper studies the effect of removing patent protection through court invalidation on the subsequent research related to the focal patent, as measured by later citations. We...

We study how fragmentation of patent rights (‘patent thickets’) and the formation of the Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) affected the duration of patent disputes, and thus the speed of technology diffusion through licensing. We develop a model of patent litigation which...

We study the determinants of patent suits and their outcomes over the period 1978- 1999 by linking detailed information from the U.S. patent office, the federal court system, and industry sources. The probability of being involved in a suit is heterogeneous, being much higher for valuable...

The composer has historically been at the top of the tree in the music industry; most royalties due to artists flow back to composers/songwriters rather than performers. Over the last few decades, the enactment of stronger performers’ rights has sought to redress this historical imbalance by...

The dominant explanatory/justificatory framework informing scholarly commentary on copyright law, policy and theory today – certainly in the US – is law and economics. From this perspective, copyright law exists to underpin markets in certain categories of ‘information good’ (copyright...