We investigate whether patents that are jointly held by legally independent companies help sustain product-market collusion. We use a simple model of repeated interactions to show that joint patents can serve collusive purposes. Our model generates two testable predictions: when joint patents...

At the start of the Industrial Revolution, patentees created many novel and complex transactions to commercialize their property: they maximized their profits through sophisticated agreements that imposed restrictions on manufacturing, sales, and other uses of their inventions. When these...

The traditional view is that patents and prizes stand in stark contrast to one another as means for promoting innovation. On this view, patents are government grants of private property rights that result in market-based, ex post rewards for innovative activity in the form of supracompetitive...

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...

In the delicate interaction between intellectual property and public interest, two antinomian questions come to the fore. The first question is to what extent patent law guarantees public interest, contributes to public interest or, on the contrary, limits public interest. The second question is...

Licensing Intellectual Property rights generates revenue for the owners of such rights. Bundling IP rights in a single license can generate more revenue. Patent rights and trade secret rights are somewhat conflicting IP rights. Combined licenses issued for using both patent rights and trade...

Patent licensing contracts commonly prohibit licensees from challenging the validity of the patents at the basis of the contract or penalize such challenges. A considerable debate has emerged as to whether courts should enforce these challenge clauses. We argue that this debate has not gone far...

The 5G mobile telecommunications standard is focusing increased attention on licensing of Standard Essential Patents (SEPs). SEP holders and technology implementers commit to negotiate license agreements on terms that are Fair, Reasonable, and Non-discriminatory (FRAND). Standard Setting...

Clinical research faces a reproducibility crisis. Many recent clinical and preclinical studies appear to be irreproducible; their results cannot be verified by outside researchers. This is problematic for not only scientific reasons but legal ones: patents grounded in irreproducible research...

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) receives more prior art submissions by patent applicants than its patent examiners have the capacity to process. Although applicant prior art submissions are highly likely to contain references material to prosecution, evidence suggests that...