At least two: the reputation of their brand and a reputation for being tough on imitators of this brand. Sustaining a brand requires both investment in its reputation amongst consumers and the defence of the brand against followers that infringe upon it. I study the defence of trade marks...

This paper analyzes the optimal protection strategy for an innovator of a complex innovation who faces the risk of imitation by a competitor. We suppose that the innovation can be continuously fragmented into sub-innovations. We characterize the optimal mix of patent and trade secrets when the...

As sustainable innovation becomes a strategy for companies to gain competitive advantage, the question of how to profit from sustainable innovation becomes central. Surprisingly, little research exists on the appropriation strategies of companies engaged in sustainable innovation and the few...

This paper examines the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on domestic innovation based on a data set covering the pharmaceutical industries across 29 provinces in the People's Republic of China (PRC) over the period 1998-2007. We show that there is a negative horizontal spillover effect...

This paper analyzes how changing the expected length of intellectual property (IP) protection affects economic growth and the welfare of rich and poor consumers. The analysis is based on a product-variety model with non-homothetic preferences and endogenous markups in which, in accordance with...

Of the diverse factors motivating technological change, one factor that has received increasing attention in the recent past has been the protection of intellectual property rights. Given fairly recent changes in the international policy ethos where a regime of stronger intellectual property...

This paper tries to find how firms use IPRs in the form of patents to protect innovation capital and find determinants of their effectiveness. The research is based on a large sample of 2960 Polish manufacturing firms that were engaged in developing and/or implementing a product or process...

North-South foreign direct investment (FDI) is frequently viewed as a process in which jobs relocate from the North to the South. I build a growth model with two asymmetric trading economies, the North where firms innovate and the South where Northern firms invest to take advantage of lower...

We study how trademarks affect reuse of creative works in the comics industry. As a creative industry, the comics industry systematically relies on copyrights. But trademark protection can also be exploited to generate income from the reuse of comic characters or to strategically exclude others...

Investments in R&D and agricultural innovations have been fundamental to long-term economic growth worldwide. But global resource allocation has been uneven, with some developing countries closing in on developed-world scientific capacities, others regaining ground lost over the past decade or...