Digital platforms are technology intensive and often require access to intellectual property rights. As those rights are often owned by competing platforms, we observe cross-licensing contracts between them. Cross-licensing facilitates the sharing of technologies, leading to less duplication of...

The literature on the licensing of an innovation has mainly focused on some specific contract types. We show within the framework of a fairly general model that removing these contractual limitations will lead to extreme market outcomes. Specifically, we find that when the patentee can employ...