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...

The Italian and European regulatory framework for patents would benefit from further improvements in order to foster dynamic competition between Italian firms. At the national level the exclusive allocation of the right to patent inventions to universities, rather than to researchers, would...

There is an ongoing debate over whether or not a trademark is “property,” and what the appropriate boundaries of such a property right might be. Some scholars assert that rules and justifications developed to handle rights in real property are generally a poor fit for intellectual property...

There is increasing concern that overlapping patents in the field of genetics will create a costly and legally complex situation known as a patent thicket, which, along with the associated issues of accumulating royalty payments, can act as a disincentive for innovation. One potential means of...

The legal monopoly granted by the patent system has often been criticized for its inefficiency, which is exacerbated by the peculiarities of knowledge as a public good. In this paper we aim at studying more deeply the latter concern. Hence we build a model in which monopolistic exploitation does...

Exporting values into society through technologyChina’s relentless advance in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and quantum computing has engendered a significant amount of anxiety about the future of America’s technological supremacy. The resulting debate centres around the impact of China’s...

This short paper reflects on the emergence of codes of best practices in fair use, highlighting both the relationship between the best practices approach and an institutional perspective on copyright and the relationship between the best practices approach and social processes of innovation and...

Property rights provide incentives to create information but also incentives to hoard it before award of protection. Even after award, others who might supplement that idea lack bargaining power until they too secure property rights. An unintended consequence is to slow, not hasten, progress...