The authors review the argument that incorporating space in economic models has two important consequences: first, the hypothesis of perfect competition becomes untenable, and second, the distinction between private and public goods becomes blurred. They summarize recent work pointing to...

In active investment climates where firms sequentially improve each other's products, a patent can terminate either because it expires or because a noninfringing innovation displaces it in the market. The patent breadth and patent life together determine which of these occurs first. We...

We address the patent/antitrust conflict in licensing and develop three guiding principles for deciding acceptable terms of license. Profit neutrality holds that patent rewards should not depend on the rightholder's ability to work the patent himself. Derived reward holds that the patentholder's...

Most innovators stand on the shoulders of giants, and never more so than in the current evolution of high technologies, where almost all technical progress builds on a foundation provided by earlier innovators. Most economics literature on patenting and patent races has looked at innovations in...

This chapter provides a comprehensive survey of the burgeoning literature on the law and economics of intellectual property. It is organized around the two principal objectives of intellectual property law: promoting innovation and aesthetic creativity (focusing on patent, trade secret, and...

Intellectual property treaties have two main types of provisions: national treatment of foreign inventors, and harmonization of protections. I characterize the circumstances in which countries would want to treat foreign inventors the same as national inventors. I then argue that national...

The task of juries is to dispense ex post justice. While justice requires convicting the guilty and acquitting the innocent, the evidence usually cannot distinguish with certainty. We argue that the jury will be more lenient in acquittals than is optimal for deterring crime whenever its...

Intellectual property treaties create two types of obligations: for national treatment of foreign inventors and for certain harmonized protections. I investigate both the incentive to join such treaties and the incentive to harmonize. As compared to an equilibrium in which the countries' policy...