The impact of patent pools on the rate and direction of technological change is an open question in both theoretical and empirical studies. Economic theory makes no unequivocal prediction. By contrast, empirical studies of patent pools, to date, have largely concluded that patent pools have been...

How far should an industry be allowed to consolidate when competition and innovation are endogenous? We develop a stochastically alternating-move game of dynamic oligopoly, and estimate it using data from the hard disk drive industry, in which a dozen global players consolidated into only three...

We assess the usefulness of patent statistics as an indicator of innovation, using a direct measure of innovation in the hard disk industry (1976--98). Three findings emerge: (1) Patents "predict" innovations better than a random guess, and a simple refinement makes them more useful; (2)...

This is an ex-post evaluation of how innovation changed following mergers and subsequent policy interventions, using an industry case study involving the 5-to-3 consolidation of three related mergers in the worldwide hard disk drive (HDD) industry, in 2011/12. Unlike most previous empirical...

This paper examines the welfare effects of intellectual property protection, accounting for firms' optimal responses to legal environments and technological innovation. I examine firms' use of indirect price discrimination in response to U.S. copyright law, which effectively prevents direct...