Intellectual property owners often hold the rights to several patents, each of which is essential to make or use a product. We compare the welfare properties of package licenses, under which a licensee pays the same fee regardless of the number of technologies licensed, with component licenses,...

In a winner-take-all duopoly market for systems in which firms invest to improve their products, a vertically integrated monopoly supplier of an essential system component may have an incentive to advantage itself by technological tying; that is, by designing the component to work better in its...

The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission have frequently raised innovation concerns as reasons to challenge mergers. This chapter surveys the economic theories of innovation incentives and considers how the theory may inform antitrust analysis for merger investigations and...

The Microsoft antitrust case focused public attention on the role of antitrust enforcement in preserving the forces of innovation in high-technology markets. Traditionally, regulators focused on whether companies artificially hiked prices or reduced output. Now, they're increasingly likely to...

Many products—including microprocessors, telecommunications devices, computer software and on-line auction services—make use of multiple technologies, each of which is essential to make or sell the product. The owner of one technology benefits from the existence of complementary...

Recently, the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission have embarked on an effort to revise and update the U.S. Horizontal Merger Guidelines. There is substantial overlap between the U.S. and E.U. Guidelines, which makes a proposal for U.S. revisions immediately applicable to the...

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...

Very large awards and settlements for patent infringement have increased dramatically since the 1980s. A large fraction of these awards have occurred in the computer hardware and software industries. Complex technologies such as computer hardware and software require rights to a very large...

A vast and often confusing economics literature relates competition to investment in innovation. Following Joseph Schumpeter, one view is that monopoly and large scale promote investment in research and development by allowing a firm to capture a larger fraction of its benefits and by providing...