What is the optimal system of intellectual property rights to encourage innovation? Empirical evidence from economic history can help to inform important policy questions that have been difficult to answer with modern data: 1) Does the existence of strong patent laws encourage innovation? And 2)...

IP monetization refers to a wide range of activities to realize value from intellectual property rights ownership. It includes traditional licenses, IP auctions, investors that finance IP development or litigation, patent assertion entities (PAEs), patent pools, strategic IP acquisition...

The IEEE-SA updated patent policy and the Business Review Letter issued by the US DoJ have caused much discussion in the US (Sidak, 2015). The purpose of this paper is to assess whether a similarly lenient antitrust approach to Standard Setting Organizations’ (“SSOs”) rate setting policies...

We are living through a transition from the industrial age to the information age. The parts of our economy related most closely to information and digital content may have been the first to feel the shift, but they will not be the last. The formative stories of the information age - the...

Patent nonuse occurs when a patentee fails to commercialize its patent, such as when the patent has no present commercial value or when attempts to license it have been unsuccessful. Patent nonuse may have anticompetitive purposes as well, and will lead to technology suppression when a patented...

New "artificial intelligence" (AI) technology promises to bring dramatic social and economic changes, demanding major policy changes. In intellectual property and antitrust law, AI will exacerbate a damaging trend: across all major sectors of the economy, proprietary information technology is...

The digital transformation "revolutionizes" entire economies and societies. It can be interpreted as a Schumpeterian technological and economic revolution that fits well into his "Theory of Economic Development" written more than 100 years ago. This paper analyzes three current policy debates...

In December 2020, new regulation of digital markets was proposed by European Commission. It specifically addresses main concerns raised by business behavior of operators of core services in their gatekeeping positions. However, voice assistants (or digital personal assistants, DPAs, e.g....

In this paper we consider a simple model of horizontal differentiation and derive the closed form solutions for the level of the variables in the decentralized economy and in the social planner case. This enables us to analyze consumers’ welfare as a function of the parameter representing...

Economic literature describes drastic and non-drastic innovations as sources of marginal cost reduction. The difference is that non-drastic innovations are unable to reduce the new marginal cost in order to ensure that the innovator is able to set monopoly price lower than the previous marginal...