For information/digital products, the used goods market has been viewed as a threat by producers. However, it is not clear if this view is justified because the used goods market also provides owners with an opportunity to sell their products. To investigate the impact of the used goods market...

There is considerable debate regarding the use of intellectual property rights (IPR) to spur innovation in the software industry. In this paper we focus on the choice of intellectual property right regimes and industry growth. We begin by developing a growth optimal mixture of open source and...

Informationen sind anders als normale, insbesondere private Güter, was bei der ökonomischen Analyse zu berücksichtigen ist. An den Beispielen Wissenschaft und Internet werden einige Besonderheiten von Informationen vorgestellt und Folgerungen daraus gezogen.

The "UsedSoft" decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) about the right of a buyer of a downloaded copy of a software to resell this copy triggered a controversial discussion about the applicability of the "exhaustion" rule (US: first-sale doctrine) to copyright-protected...

We study an endogenous growth model where a profit-motivated R and D sector coexists with the introduction of free blueprints invented by philanthropists. These goods are priced at marginal cost, contrary to proprietary ones which are produced by a monopoly owned by the inventor. We show that...

The effects of (private, small-scale) piracy on the pricing behavior of producers of information goods are studied within a unified model of vertical differentiation. Although information goods are assumed to be perfectly horizontally differentiated, demands are interdependent because the...

Commercial (and non-commercial) science publishing has evolved as a solution to a number of problems in the market for research results. It has reduced transaction costs by bringing together authors and readers, which is just the simple advantage of market intermediaries. It has delivered added...

In enterprise software markets, firms are increasingly using services-based business models built on open-source software (OSS) to compete with established, proprietary software firms. Because thirdparty firms can also strategically contribute to OSS and compete in the services market, the...

The marginal cost of a good is not usually a relevant factor when crafting intellectual property policy. Marginal costs estimates are based on models of static efficiency, not dynamic efficiency, which is more relevant to policymakers.Profit margins on goods must be high enough to both support...