We present a selective survey of the economic theory of intellectual property rights. After a brief description of the institutional framework, we discuss policy objectives and some basic welfare tradeoffs in intellectual property design. We consider the extent to which social objectives can be...

Since the issue first emerged in the policy arena in the early 2000s, economists have been debating the meaning and implications of FRAND licensing commitments within cooperative technology standard setting organizations (SSOs). Today the issue is global, with scholars and policymakers in...

This paper presents preliminary results from a pilot experiment dealing with the economic motivations to contribute to Free/Open Source Software (FOSS). In a seminal paper Bessen and Maskin (2006) argue that in a dynamic sequential innovation framework in which every innovation builds on...