With cumulative innovation and imperfect information about the value of innovations, intellectual property rights can result in hold-up and therefore it may be better not to have them. Extending the basic cumulative innovation model to include `sampling' by second-stage firms, we find that the...

Internet search (or perhaps more accurately `web-search') has grown exponentially over the last decade at an even more rapid rate than the Internet itself. Starting from nothing in the 1990s, today search is a multi-billion dollar business. Search engine providers such as Google and Yahoo! have...

An extensive empirical literature indicates that returns from innovation are appropriated primarily via mechanisms other than formal intellectual property rights -- and that `imitation' is itself a costly activity. However most theory assumes the pure nonrivalry of `ideas' with its implication...

The optimal term of copyright has been a matter for extensive debate over the last decade. Using a simple model we characterise optimal term as a function of a few key parameters. We estimate this function using a combination of new and existing data on recordings and books and find an optimal...

A sizable literature has grown up in recent years focusing on two-sided markets in which economies of scale combined with complementarities between a platform and its associated `software' or `services' can generate indirect network effects (that is positive feedback between the number of...

The work presented here is part of a wider research programme oriented around three specific questions. First, how do individual agents appropriate returns from innovation and how is this affected by the availability (or not) of intellectual property rights such as copyrights and patents?...

There has been a wide-spread misconception based on the imprecise wording of Art. 52 of the European Patent Convention (EPC) that the protection of business methods by patents is prohibited in Europe. This paper investigates the legal framework set by patent laws with respect to the...

Der Beitrag diskutiert die Anwendung des im Rahmen der Unternehmensbewertung häufig angewandten Gordon/Shapiro-Modells bei Vorliegen von Inflation sowie persönlichen Steuern. Gezeigt wird, dass sich steuerlich bedingtes und inflationsinduziertes Wachstum parallel im Kalkül erfassen lassen,...