Many observers have voiced concerns that standards create essentiality and thus monopoly power for the holders of standard essential patents (SEPs). To address these concerns, Lerner and Tirole (2015) advocate structured price commitments, whereby SEP holders commit to the maximum royalty they...

Standardization may allow the owners of standard-essential patents to charge royalty rates exceeding those that would have been negotiated ex ante. In practice, however, standard-setting efforts are often characterized by repeated interaction and complementarities among technologies. These...

We compare certification to a minimum quality standard (MQS) policy in a duopolistic industry where firms incur quality-dependent fixed costs and only a fraction of consumers observes the quality of the offered goods. Compared to the unregulated outcome, both profits and social welfare would...