We examine patent pools in the context of a consortium standard. Although such pools of complementary technologies are approved by antitrust authorities, the actual implementation has proved to be problematic. We identify two possible obstacles: free riding and bargaining failure. We also...

This market research aims to provide an overview of the Eco Building (or Green) activity in the European market. Energy efficiency is today at the top of the European political agenda, as from the analysis of chapter one (Legal Framework). It is part of the triple goal of the '20-20-20'...

The participation of firms in Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities is growing and is increasingly debated among scholars. As Ousterhout (1999) explained, ?FLOSS needs profit? and we do not know of any successful FLOSS products without firms in their ecosystem, either through the...

To disentangle the relations between standards, innovation and competition, this paper examined the processes and effects of standardization in Japanese firms. The realities of their activities were provided by a postal questionnaire sent to progressive large firms in Japanese industries....

In agricultural subsectors, collective organizations such as producer groups or second-degree cooperatives frequently cope with management of brand names. The success of these brand names depends upon the ability of actors to collectively create, guarantee and sustain a stream of rents based...

We adopt a framework of vertical differentiation (i.e. differentiation by quality) to study the issue of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). We develop a model of duopoly in a two‐country setting, in which firms choose the country of location, the level of CSR and finally compete in the...

Between 1967 and 1979, we produced a number of studies that explored different facets of the economics of advertising. This work culminated in our 1974 book entitled Advertising and Market Power. Our leading hypothesis was that heavy advertising expenditures often but not always had...

Contract stipulations tend to be subject to commodity standards. Standards make it clearer what transactors have agreed upon. They also bring stipulations from different contracts under a common denominator. The lower the cost of measuring an attribute and the wider the range of its application,...

The paper is based on the acknowledgement that properties of markets stemming from features of demand are too frequently overlooked in the economic literature, and a re-balancing is necessary to properly account for theoretical and empirical phenomena. We sustain that one of the most relevant...