The “monopoly” authorized by the Patent Act refers to the exclusionary power of individual patents. That is not the same thing as the acquisition of individual patent rights into portfolios that dominate a market, something that the Patent Act never justifies and that the antitrust laws...

A patent "pool" is an arrangement under which patent holders in a common technology commit their patents to a single holder, who then licenses them out to the original patentees and perhaps also to outsiders. The payoffs include both revenue earned as a licensor, and technology acquired by pool...

Patent holdup occurs when a patent holder extracts higher royalties ex post (after the payor has committed to use of the patented technology) than it could have negotiated ex ante, where the difference is not explained by an increase in the technology's value. To date, the literature principally...

Patent settlements between rivals restrain competition in many different ways. Antitrust requires them to be "proportional" in that their anti-competitive effects are commensurate with the firms' expectations about (counterfactual) patent litigation. Because these expectations are private and...

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) is a recently-formed division of the Patent Office in which patents can be challenged as invalid, and which differs from federal courts in a number of respects. We investigate whether monopolist-patentees and their prospective rivals are using the PTAB...

Competitors embroiled in a patent dispute always prefer to preserve and share monopoly profits, even if the patent is likely invalid. Antitrust has come to embrace a policy that requires horizontal settlements to be "proportional" in the sense that their anticompetitive effects are commensurate...

When rivals settle a patent dispute, they prefer to preserve the full monopoly profit, even if the patent is very likely invalid. The literature advocates comparing settlement outcomes to the expected result of litigation, but has not identified a comprehensive means of doing this. We show that...

When a technological standard is adopted, implementers must pay to license all “standard-essential” patents (SEPs)—those covering core features of the standard—although the particular price terms usually cannot negotiated beforehand. To allay implementers' fear of being “held up,”...

The America Invents Act of 2011 (“AIA”) created a robust administrative system—the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“PTAB”)—for challenging the validity of granted patents. Congress determined that administrative correction of errors made in initial patent grants could be cheaper and...