Societies provide institutions that are costly to use, but able to enforce long-run relationships. We study the optimal decision problem of using self-governance for risk sharing or governance through enforcement provided by these institutions. Third-party enforcement is modelled as a costly...

Study on the desirability of EC level legislation in the area of software patents. It is based on a comparative analysis of the present state of the law, and the advantages and disadvantages appearing from current practice in the EC Member States, the United States and Japan. While its principal...

This study has been carried out at the request of the EGE for the preparation of Opinion n°16 "Ethical aspects of patenting inventions involving human stem cell" , 12 January 2002

This is a report on aspects of the interface between competition law and patent law. Competition authorities have long been aware of the potentially difficult relationship between these two bodies of Law. At the level of the EU, this relationship has already been abundantly discussed in both the...

The rapid changes in technologies that are used for R&D have created new opportunities and needs for strategic management of IPRs and knowledge, especially when used in a collaborative context. The use of new ICT technologies is fundamentally altering the way R&D is done. This is leading to a...