Most patent pools are formed in the shadow of patent litigation as an attempt to settle disputes in regard to conflicting infringement claims and the validity of patents. To reflect this reality, I develop a simple framework to analyze the incentives to form a patent pool or engage in...

We briefly survey several insights about value and revenue maximization in multi-object auctions and apply them to the German (and Austrian) UMTS auction. In particular, we discuss in detail the exposure problem that caused firms in Germany to pay almost Euro 20 billion for nothing.