Several of the risks currently faced by corporations are shaped by legal rules. Liability rules, for instance, determine the cases in which firms will incur economic losses, either because thay are obliged to compensate for the harm suffered by others, or because they are inflicted monetary...

Kunst und Kommerz gelten immer noch weithin als unvereinbar. Tatsächlich aber sind sie eng miteinander verknüpft. Denn wer von seiner künstlerischen oder publizistischen Arbeit leben möchte, wird unweigerlich zum Existenzgründer bzw. beruflich Selbständigen...

Immaterial information products (“content”) can be represented in digital form, which is anadvantage but also a source of problems. It is fundamentally impossible to prevent copyingof digital data, which is just a stream of bits – ones and zeros: Once you can read it, you cancopy it. With...

The contributory infringement rule assesses liability to a third party that contributes tothe infringement of a patent. Not only are firms that directly infringe liable, those whoindirectly contribute are also liable. We investigate how this rule affects the creation of anetwork of members...

Basic innovations are often fundamental to the development of applications that maybe developed by other innovators. In this setting, we investigate whether patent pools canrectify the lack of incentives for developers to invest in applications. Following Green andScotchmer (1995), we also...

The increasing commercialization of university discoveries has initiated acontroversy on the impacts for future scientific research. It has been argued that anincreasing orientation towards commercialization may have a negative impact onmore fundamental research efforts in science. Several...

We develop a dynamic duopoly model of R&D competition to improve the quality of a finalgood. The innovation process is sequential and cumulative, and takes place alongside productionin an infinite-horizon setting. In this context we study the R&D incentive impacts resultingfrom a “research...