This paper extends analysis of the GATT Uruguay Round by quantifying the impact of international patent harmonization as implied by the TRIPs agreement. What emerges is a picture of patent protection as an important method for appropriating the rents of an invention. On this basis patent...

We challenge the common wisdom that patent protection (compared to no or weak patent protection) makes the consumers worse off by reducing product-market competition unless it increases innovation significantly. We show that the absence of patent protection may encourage horizontal merger and...

Intellectual property moral rights must be carefully studied by the business community, which could easily and wrongly believe that the intellectual property business involves only intellectual property economic rights. This paper represent an introduction meant to reveal a contrasting legal and...

It has been commonly argued that the decision of a large number of inventors to license complementary patents necessary for the development of a product leads to excessively large royalties. This well-known Cournot-complements or royalty-stacking effect would hurt efficiency and downstream...

This paper reviews and compares patent pools, intellectual property clearinghouses and copyright collectives as alternative systems for promoting efficient access to licensable intellectual property in a 'market for technology' (Arora et al 2001). These systems aid downstream use of innovations...

What form of intellectual property rights (IPR) policy contributes to economic growth? Should technological followers be able to license the products of technological leaders? Should a company with a large technological lead receive the same IPR protection as a company with a more limited lead?...

First, The paper identifies the social welfare loss of patent system due to underutilization of patent knowledge. Second, we introduce the notion of aggregate patent protection and deduce the optimal patent policy. Third, we compare aggregate patent protection and effective patent life

This article presents a new theoretical framework for evaluating the proportion of a product's surplus attributable to intellectual property (IP, such as patents or trademarks). It is used to explain the empirically observed differences between the use patterns of IP in industries based on...