Recent advances in engineering collaboration tools and internet technology have enabled the distribution of product development tasks to offshore sites and global outsourcing partners while still maintaining a tightly connected process. Most firms in complex engineering industries are indeed...

Patent race models assume that an innovator wins the only patent covering a product. But when technologies are complex, this property right is defective: ownership of a product's technology is shared, not exclusive. In that case I show that if patent standards are low, firms build "thickets" of...