This study was commissioned by the Inter-American Development Bank and it reviews and makes recommendations on the laws, administration and enforcement practices in intellectual property in five Caribbean countries: the Bahamas, Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. Virtually all...

Hundreds of patents cover products in many high technology fields such as semiconductors, information technology, and biotechnology. Firms that make, sell, or use products in these fields often have to negotiate patent rights with many intellectual property owners. The time and effort required...

The economic analysis of intellectual property rights (IPR) usually focuses on material goods. In addition, IPR laws were primarily developed in relation to industrial sectors. Today, the structural evolution of economies and technological progress impose to reconsider the role of the main forms...

Patent pendencies create uncertainty in research and development (R&D) collaboration agreements, resulting in a threat of expropriation of unprotected knowledge by potential partners, reduced bargaining power and enhanced search costs. In this paper, we show that - depending of the type of...

I construct an endogenous growth model where R&D is carried out at the industry level in a game of innovation between leaders and followers. Innovation costs for followers are assumed to increase with the technological lag from leaders. We obtain three results that contrast with standard...

Two court decisions in the 1990s are widely viewed as having opened the door to a flood of business method and financial patents at the US Patent and Trademark Office, and to have also impacted other patent offices around the world. A number of scholars, both legal and economic, have critiqued...

The patent system makes organized markets in patents with transparent prices possible. Such prices are here investigated as "signals" for inventors and innovators alike of valuable "technology areas," in an experimental study. They inform decisions of specialized "firms" on allocation of...

The question of how prices on patents rights should be determined in impersonal exchanges is examined in a laboratory environment. Dynamic gains from such organized trade with public prices are recorded. The experiment introduces a competitive market with impersonal exchange mechanisms and...

Inventors and users of technology often enter into cooperative agreements for sharing their intellectual property in order to implement a standard or to avoid costly litigation. Over the past two decades, U.S. antitrust authorities have viewed pooling arrangements that integrate complementary,...