The patent market consists mainly of privately negotiated, bilateral transactions, either sales or cross-licenses, between large companies. There is no eBay, Amazon, New York Stock Exchange, or Kelley's Blue Book equivalent for patents, and when buyers and sellers do manage to find each other,...

Preserving endangered species on private land benefits the public, but may confer cost on landowners if property is 'taken.' Government compensation to landowners can offset costs, although the Endangered Species Act does not require compensation. The authors survey private economic incentives...

Public policy analysis of optimal patent regimes is often framed as a tradeoff between static and dynamic efficiency. In this analytical framework, weak patent protection and strict antitrust policy are taken to be directed toward static concerns, while protection of intellectual property...

What is the optimal system of intellectual property rights to encourage innovation? Empirical evidence from economic history can help to inform important policy questions that have been difficult to answer with modern data: For example, does the existence of strong patent laws encourage...

Among the main criticisms currently confronting the US Patent and Trademark Office are concerns about software patents and what role they play in the web of litigation now proceeding in the smart phone industry. We will examine the evidence on the litigation and the treatment by the Patent...

The case against patents can be summarized briefly: there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity, unless productivity is identified with the number of patents awarded—which, as evidence shows, has no correlation with measured productivity. Both theory...

Most innovators stand on the shoulders of giants, and never more so than in the current evolution of high technologies, where almost all technical progress builds on a foundation provided by earlier innovators. Most economics literature on patenting and patent races has looked at innovations in...

Although economists have written on topics of intellectual property for a long time, the impact of economics on public policy in this area has been slight, especially as compared to the influence of professional writings in areas such as antitrust and taxation. We believe that too few of the...

This essay synthesizes and re-conceptualizes some central results of the economic analysis of liability law and sketches the legal details that drive them. Three different legal mechanisms for creating efficient incentives are examined in turn. The first mechanism uses the legal rule of strict...