These are neither the best of times nor the worst of times for the pharmaceutical industry, or for global public health. Media reports regarding recent legal developments would suggest that the originator pharmaceutical industry is facing a new and dangerous threat to its long-term welfare,...

Consumers have shifted their consumption of online content dramatically from websites that they browse from a personal computer to apps that they use on mobile devices. Marketers have moved with the eyeballs, particularly since people use their smartphones much of the day and carry them wherever...

This paper focuses on the role that business models play in cooperative standard setting. Certain business models, namely upstream specialists with no manufacturing of their own, have been vilified by some as patent trolls bent on exploiting the standard setting process. This view ignores...

The free public services doctrine (also known as the municipal cost recovery rule) states that a government entity may not recover from a tortfeasor the costs of public services occasioned by the tortfeasor's wrongdoing. This article traces the history of the doctrine and argues for its...

The challenge of achieving socially optimal incentives for innovation in public goods faces twin market failures: a market failure to adequately promote public goods invention and a market failure to implement innovative public goods once developed. Though innovation in private goods sometimes...

Regulators around the world are attempting to reconcile the changing demands of 21st century economies with the insights two schools of thought, New Governance and Behavioural Economics, are offering. The common emerging theme, expressed by the UK and American administrations as well as in other...

The value of risks to life as measured by the risk-money trade-off plays a fundamental role in economic analyses of health and safety risks and serves as the principal benefit measure for government risk regulation policies. The hedonic models that have been employed to generate empirical...

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...

Patents are a key element of our knowledge based economy. They are meant to operate as an instrument for fostering innovation by generating incentives through the grant of temporary exclusive rights. The present paper starts by describing some major trends in patent law and practice and throws...

This paper extends Boadway and Keen (1993)'s work in several ways, in particular by considering two public goods, a pure public good and a good with redistributive characteristics. Under this new characterisation, it shows that is still possible to join an allocation of goods which corresponds...