Private antitrust litigation often involves a dominant firm being accused of exclusionary conduct by a smaller rival. In such cases, the defendant generally has a much larger financial stake in the outcome. We explore the implications of this asymmetry in a model of litigation with endogenous...

Patent holdup occurs when a patent holder extracts higher royalties ex post (after the payor has committed to use of the patented technology) than it could have negotiated ex ante, where the difference is not explained by an increase in the technology's value. To date, the literature principally...

The “monopoly” authorized by the Patent Act refers to the exclusionary power of individual patents. That is not the same thing as the acquisition of individual patent rights into portfolios that dominate a market, something that the Patent Act never justifies and that the antitrust laws...

Patent settlements between rivals restrain competition in many different ways. Antitrust requires them to be "proportional" in that their anti-competitive effects are commensurate with the firms' expectations about (counterfactual) patent litigation. Because these expectations are private and...

Startup acquisitions by dominant incumbents, especially in high-tech, have recently attracted significant attention. Many researchers and practitioners worry about harms to competition or innovation. However, there has been very little antitrust enforcement in this area. This is emblematic of a...

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) is a recently-formed division of the Patent Office in which patents can be challenged as invalid, and which differs from federal courts in a number of respects. We investigate whether monopolist-patentees and their prospective rivals are using the PTAB...

Should there be limits on startup acquisitions by dominant firms? Efficiency requires that startups sell their technology to the right incumbents, that they develop the right technology, and that they invest the right amount in R&D. In a model of differentiated oligopoly, we show distortions...

Competitors embroiled in a patent dispute always prefer to preserve and share monopoly profits, even if the patent is likely invalid. Antitrust has come to embrace a policy that requires horizontal settlements to be "proportional" in the sense that their anticompetitive effects are commensurate...