There has been a recent surge of interest in open source software development, which involves developers at many different locations and organizations sharing code to develop and refine programs. To an economist, the behavior of individual programmers and commercial companies engaged in open...

The sub-prime crisis has shown a harsh spotlight on the practices of securities underwriters, which provided too many complex securities that proved to ultimately have little value. This uproar calls attention to the fact that the literature on intermediaries has carefully analyzed their...

This paper empirically explores the procedures employed by standard-setting organizations. Consistent with Lerner-Tirole (2004), we find (a) a negative relationship between the extent to which an SSO is oriented to technology sponsors and the concession level required of sponsors and (b) a...

This paper is an initial exploration of the determinants of open source license choice. It first enumerates the various considerations that should figure into the licensor's choice of contractual terms, in particular highlighting how the decision is shaped not just by the preferences of the...

The paper builds a tractable model of a patent pool, an agreement among patent owners to license a set of their patents to one another or to third parties. It first provides a necessary and suñcient condition for a patent pool to enhance welfare. It shows that requiring pool members to be able...

While policymakers often assume venture capital has a profound impact on innovation, that premise has not been evaluated systematically. We address this omission by examining the influence of venture capital on patented inventions in the United States across twenty industries over three decades....

This paper examines several recent avenues of empirical research into the enforcement of" intellectual property rights. To frame these issues, we start with a stylized model of the patent" litigation process. The bulk of the paper is devoted to linking the empirical literature on patent"...

We investigate the cause of an unprecedented surge of U.S. patenting over the past" decade. Conventional wisdom points to the establishment of the Court of Appeals of the" Federal Circuit by Congress in 1982. We examine whether this institutional change benefitted patent holders, explains the...

This paper examines the suggestion that established plaintiffs request preliminary injunctions to engage in predation against less financially healthy firms. We first present a model in which differences in litigation costs drive the use of preliminary injunctions in civil litigation. The...

A key role of standard setting organizations (SSOs) is to aggregate information on relevant intellectual property (IP) claims before deciding on a standard. This article explores the firms' strategies in response to IP disclosure requirements--in particular, the choice between specific and...