Our food supply rests on a foundation of agricultural seed. As the world races to meet soaring food demand, the development and control of this fundamental genetic resource will be of critical concern to the entire human community. Seed, once treated as a shared public good and natural resource,...

This paper analyzes a model of oligopolistic competition with ongoing investment. It incorporates the following models as special cases: incremental investment, patent races, learning-by-doing, and network externalities. We investigate circumstances under which a firm with low costs or high...

We analyse how a patent-holding pharmaceutical firm may strategically use advertising of existing drugs to affect R&D investments in new (differentiated) drugs, and thereby affect the probability distribution of future market structures in the industry. Within a fairly general model framework,...

An important discussion in recent years is the introduction of product patentsand the abolition of process patents. In a model with endogenous number of innovatingfirms, we show that whether product patent increases R&D is ambiguous, and depends onthe type of market demand and the cost of R&D....

Licensing in a patent thicket allows firms to either avoid or resolve hold-up. Firms' R&D incentives depend on whether they license ex ante or ex post. We develop a model of a patent portfolio race, which allows for endogenous R&D efforts, to study firms' choice between ex ante and ex post...

In a patent thicket licensing provides a mechanism to either avoid or resolve hold-up. Firms' R&D incentives will differ depending on how licensing is used. In this paper we study the choice between ex ante licensing to avoid hold-up and ex post licensing to resolve it. Building on a theoretical...

Complex high technology industries are increasingly affected by patent thickets in which firms' patents mutually block the use of important technologies. Firms facing patent thickets patent intensively to acquire bargaining chips and use licensing to ensure freedom to operate. Such licensing...

In a patent thicket licensing provides a mechanism to either avoid or resolve hold up. We study the choice between ex ante licensing to avoid hold up and ex post licensing to resolve it. Firms' choice of licensing contract is studied in the context of a patent portfolio race. We show that high...

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that exclusive owners of an advanced technology are always better off when producing as a monopolist than when competing against another firm. Competition against a less efficient firm weakens the power that a host country can exert on the incumbent...

Big companies and small innovation factories possess different advantages in a patent contest. While large firms typically have a better access to product markets, small firms often have a superior R&D efficiency. In this paper I model a patent contest with asymmetric firms. In a pre-contest...