This paper shows how a financial institution can profit from the development of financial products even if they are unpatentable.

This paper analyzes the effect of an increase in patent scope on R&D and innovation. It presents a model where patent scope affects an entrant firm's technology choice and thereby creates a trade-off between R&D investments and wasteful duplication of R&D. The model predicts that an increase in...

Investment Banks invest in R&D to design innovative securities even when imitation is possible, i.e., when innovations cannot be patented. We show how a financial institution can profit from the development of financial products even if they are unpatentable. For certain types of financial...

This paper analyzes the effect of an increase in patent scope on R&D and innovation. It presents a model where patent scope affects an entrant firm's technology choice and thereby creates a trade-off between R&D investments and wasteful duplication of R&D. The model predicts that an increase in...

Currently trademark bullying has become a serious concern for many small businesses that feel as though powerful corporations are abusing aggressive trademark enforcement and litigation techniques to crush genuine competition. No doubt these concerns merit the serious consideration of all...

As intellectual property chapters are now regularly part of free trade agreements, countries need to have a clear view of what elements of a patent system will encourage domestic innovation and what elements will simply raise the cost of goods and services. Drawing on the range of empirical...

The management by administrative authorities of law violations represents one of the instruments for enforcing laws in China, the other way is lawsuit. The law allows administrative discretion to achieve efficiency but may lead to unfair law enforcement. Governments’ establishing patent...

The twenty-first century “patent litigation explosion” is not unprecedented. In fact, the nineteenth century saw an even bigger surge of patent cases. During that era, the most prolific patent enforcers brought hundreds or even thousands of suits, dwarfing the efforts of today's leading...

Patents are intended to be used as instruments to further policy. One potent policy driver to accomplish such goals is through the legal construction and application of the term "invention." Internationally, various legal authorities have recognized that this definition can be crafted in ways...

Proponents of the patent-holdup conjecture implicitly model competition among different technologies for inclusion in a standard as a static Bertrand pricing game without (1) any capacity restraints, (2) any product differentiation, and (3) any outside option for the inventors. On the basis of...