The economic characteristics of software and transaction costs explain, why closed source and open source software co-exist. It is about the efficient use of a non- and anti-scarce resource. But because of ex-post transaction costs that lead to information asymmetries, some property rights...

Using a new dataset with detailed geographic information about licensing activities of the Max Planck Society, Germany's largest non-university public research organization, we analyze how the probability and magnitude of commercial success are affected by geographic distance between licensors...

We analyze the impact of institutional and cultural factors on the supply side of open source software (OSS). OSS is a privately provided public good: it is marked by free access to the software and its source code, and is developed in a public, collaborative manner by thousands of volunteers as...

The paper analyzes the impact of institutional and cultural factors on a remarkable economic activity: the production of so-called open source software (OSS). OSS is marked by free access to the software and its source code. Copyright-based OSS licenses permit users to use, change, improve and...

In the ICT sector, product-software is an important factor for the quality of the products (e.g. cell phones). In this context, open source software enables firms to avoid quality competition as they can cooperate on quality without an explicit contract. The economics of open source (OS) versus...

The aim of this paper is to test whether patent-based indicators are still reliable measures of innovativeness in light of organizational changes in the field of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection and the regulatory reforms already under way respectively at the U.S. Patent and...

We examine ownership patterns of German university-invented patents before and after the abolition of the "professors' privilege" in 2002 to explore how the legal change affected patenting activities. Our data show a shift from individually-owned and firm-owned patents to university-owned...

This policy paper on science-industry technology transfer has four emphases: the rationale of recent changes in German science policy, the contribution of diverse transfer channels to economic development as well as the role of IPR in that context, the differences in the institutional framework...

This paper develops theoretical standpoints to investigate and analyse university inventors and patenting activities. Although the studies on academic entrepreneurship and university patenting have substantially increased, first there have not been enough studies on individual inventors and...

This paper discusses several features of knowledge that are often considered crucial for characterizing the economic significance of knowledge: whether it is overtly accessible or tacit, whether it can be or is encoded or not, and whether it has public or private good character. It is argued...