We consider patent pool formation by owners of essential patents for differentiated standards that may be complements or substitutes in use. Pooling improves coordination in terms of royalty setting within a standard but provokes a strategic response from licensors in the competing standard. We...

We focus on downstream uses that combine multiple intellectual property rights and examine the effects of introducing an intellectual property clearinghouse that reduces transaction costs associated with licensing. We show that this causes equilibrium royalties to rise in some cases and may harm...

This paper reviews and compares patent pools, intellectual property clearinghouses and copyright collectives as alternative systems for promoting efficient access to licensable intellectual property in a 'market for technology' (Arora et al 2001). These systems aid downstream use of innovations...

We examine the effects of informational intermediation by a third party 'infomediary' in a search model with heterogeneous seller qualities and asymmetric information. The infomediary earns revenue by selling a list of accredited sellers (a 'guidebook') to buyers and selling accreditations to...

This paper reviews the recent literature on the economics of open source software. Two different sets of issues are addressed. The first looks at the incentives of programmers to participate in open source projects. The second considers the business models used by profit-making firms in the open...

This paper develops a model of simple 'reputation systems' that monitor and publish information about the behavior of sellers in a market with search frictions and asymmetric information. The reputations created by these systems influence the equilibrium search investments of buyers and thus...

Using data for 134 locations in New Zealand, we study the effects of crime and agglomeration on urban amenity. We find that crime has significant negative effects on the value of urban amenity, with elasticities of approximately −0.06 for firms and −0.09 for workers. To put this effect in...

We examine the effect of collective rights organizations (CROs) on upstream innovation. CROs are established to facilitate downstream use, such as production and downstream innovation, of upstream intellectual property. We compare CROs with two alternative royalty redistribution rules, two...

Reputation systems have emerged as important sources of information in modern economies. This paper develops a model of reputation systems that puts buyers and sellers inside a stochastic environment involving asymmetric information and search frictions, and gives them a set of options with...

This paper explores the trade-off between the short-term benefits of false quality advertisements against the longer term costs of reputation damage. A directed search model is constructed in which submarkets are created by the advertisements and reputations of sellers. A reputation system links...