A patent is not a perfect protection against imitation. It only grants the patentholder the right to sue intruders once they have been identified. In order to identify an infringer, a patentholder must first monitor the market, and then react in case of infringement. His reaction may be to go to...

Intellectual property rights are legal constraints that limit entry in industries where incumbents are innovators. The set of legal constraints is the same for all industries, without considering that the externalities created by entry are not necessarily negative for the incumbent or that the...

"Information Disclosure in the Renewal of Patents" (with Claude Crampes), Les Annales d'Economie et Statistique, 49-50, pp 265-288, 1998. Reprinted in The Economics and Econometrics of Innovation, ed. Encaoua, Hall, Laisney, Mairesse, Kluwer academic publishers, 2000.

This paper presents a model of media competition with free entry when media operators are financed both from advertisers and customers. The relation between advertising receipts and sales receipts, which are both complementary and antagonist, is different if media operators impose a price or a...

By defining three targets as pillars of their environmental policy (20% cleaning, 20% greening, and 20% saving energy by 2020), European authorities are putting out noisy signals on what the actual objective is and how to achieve it. I show that, whereas the community-wide CO2 market (named...

We analyze the interaction between a reliable source of electricity production and intermittent sources such as wind or solar power. We first characterize the optimal energy mix, emphasizing the availability of the intermittent source as a major parameter for the optimal investment in capacity....

Thanks to "smart grids", consumers will gradually become active players in electricity markets, especially by voluntarily decreasing their consumption when receiving scarcity messages from the market operator. For a fast and efficient transition to a more dynamic industry, the regulatory and...