Where product innovation requires several complementary patents, fragmented property rights can limit firms' willingness to invest in R&D. We consider the research intensity in multiple simultaneous R & D contests and how it depends on whether firms already hold relevant patents as well as the...

The prevalence of intermediaries (middlemen) in supply chains is often seen as a dying remnant of less efficient times. Despite predictions that supply chains will rapidly “cut out the middleman” as technological advances have eased logistics, middlemen have continued to thrive. In this...

This paper employs a unique Italian data source to take a comprehensive approach to labor market pooling. It jointly considers many different aspects of the agglomeration - labor market relationship, including turnover, learning, matching, and hold up. It also considers labor market pooling from...

In this paper, we consider a knowledge accumulation problem within an organization. We depart from the human capital theory initiated by Becker (1962, 1964) and consider an organization that cannot prevent the worker from quitting and using the knowledge outside the organization. We study how...

During negotiations, parties plan an exchange that will occur in the future and that implies a high level of uncertainty, regarding both contract conditions and final outcome. In this phase, parties are requested, according to country-specific legal framework, to act in good faith. As a matter...

This paper surveys models of markets in which some consumers are "savvy" while others are not. We discuss when the presence of savvy consumers improves the deals available to non-savvy consumers in the market (the case of search externalities), and when the non-savvy fund generous deals for...

From the perspective of antitrust authorities, the multiplication of patents embodied in technology standards is a source of concerns. Certainly it is necessary and efficient that patents owners derive a revenue from the use of the standard. Yet by their function - ensuring compatibility between...

Open Source Software is often viewed as an anti-intellectual property regime. By contrast, we argue how IP law is at the heart of open source model since licenses that organize the innovation and business relationships between developers, distributors and end-users are based on copyright law....

We relate the design of contract law to the process of development. In this paper, contract law defines which private agreements are enforceable (i.e. are binding and enforced by courts) and which are not. Specically, we consider an economy where agents face a hold-up problem (moral hazard in...

This paper shows that the under-investment in firm financed training caused by hold up can justify the introduction of firing taxes in a laissez-faire economy with search frictions and risk neutral agents. More precisely we highlight two results. First, the introduction of a firing tax for newly...