A current refrain in patent policy discourse is that “overly-broad” patents of “dubious validity” retard innovation. We briefly review expressions of the thesis to show that they reduce to the allegation that disagreements over enforceable patent scope and/or validity harm innovation....

This paper examines complementarity among vertical integration decisions in automobile product development. Though most research assumes that contracting choices are independent of each other, contracting complementarity arises when the returns to a single vertical integration decision are...

This paper examines the impact of vertical integration on the dynamics of performance over the automobile product development lifecycle. Building on recent work in organizational economics and strategy, we evaluate the relationship between vertical integration and different performance margins....

Transnational corporations are oligopolistic firms engaged in strategic games designed to enhance their market share at the expense of their rivals. They benefit from having governments see them as insiders within a regional market, and their rivals as outsiders. This article hypothesizes that...

This paper examines the production and political responses of the Big Three auto assemblers to the penetration of the North American market by Japanese auto assemblers over the 1955-95 period, using the technological competition model to analyze three successive challenges faced by the Big...

We study the determinants of make-or-buy decisions for engines made by every recorded U.S. auto firm during 1917-1933. Most make-or-buy studies testing predictions of transaction cost economics exclude smaller firms, even though their make-or-buy behavior might be different from large firms' due...

Over the last few decades, innovation has doubled automobile performance at a time when outsourcing has increased. But outsourcing is subject to well-known contracting hazards that would also afflict outsourcing for innovation. In this paper, we examine how supplier firms generate innovation in...

The paper first discusses alternative theoretical frameworks to analyse the impacts of FDI on host economies. Second, it provides an overview of major developments in the Hungarian automotive industry since the early 1990s, discussing both firm strategies and the macro level factors influencing...

This study addresses the determinants of time-to-licensing, defined as the elapsed time between the disclosure of an invention and the signed licensing contract, and its impact on the commercial success of the licensed inventions from public research. Using a dataset containing detailed...