The literature on patent license auctions in oligopoly assumed that the auctioneer reveals the winning bid and stressed that this gives firms an incentive to bid high in order to signal an aggressive output strategy in a downstream Cournot market game, and conversely bid low to signal...

We reconsider the optimal licensing of technology by an incumbent firm in the presence of multiple potential licensees. In a first step we consider the standard case of one license and show that competition among potential licensees has a drastic effect on optimal two-part tariff contracts. We...