We investigate whether patents that are jointly held by legally independent companies help sustain product-market collusion. We use a simple model of repeated interactions to show that joint patents can serve collusive purposes. Our model generates two testable predictions: when joint patents...

In this paper, I empirically study the effect of IEEE’s IPR policy change in 2015 on standard related innovation. I construct a novel dataset of companies that have declared at least one patent as essential for an IEEE standard (the treatment group), and I then collect a sample of firms active...