In a patent thicket licensing provides a mechanism to either avoid or resolve hold up. We study the choice between ex ante licensing to avoid hold up and ex post licensing to resolve it. Firms’ choice of licensing contract is studied in the context of a patent portfolio race. We show that high expected blocking leads to ex ante licensing while ex post licensing arises if expected blocking is lo...

We analyse the problem of a non-producing patentee who licenses an essential process innovation to a vertical Cournot oligopoly. The vertical oligopoly is composed of an upstream and a downstream sector which may differ in their efficiency or, in other words, in the benefit they derive from the innovation. In this framework we characterise the optimal licensing contract in terms of the licensin...

One-third of the world’s population lacks access to the most basic essential drugs. For the destitute sick in the developing world, the price of medicines can determine whether they will be treated. Patents drive drug prices up, the resultant monopoly status allowing the producer to charge whatever price the market will bear. The World Trade OrganizationTradeRelated Aspects of Intellectual Prop...

Introduction Hospitals, dialysis facilities, and nephrol-ogy practices are continuously purchasing and upgrading their software in order to more efficiently operate their businesses and enhance the quality of care provided to their patients. Whether relating to billing , electronic medical records, or other software, vendors present these providers with Software License and Services Agreements ...

Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3) and Simple Queue Service (SQS) offer enterprise-class computing, storage and coordination facilities to any organization or individual in the world with a valid credit card. This paper details our experience working with these commodity grid computing services between November 2006 and May 2007, including an analysis of the o...

We show the impact of technology licensing on optimal patent policy. Strong patent protection that eliminates imitation may not be the equilibrium outcome in the presence of licensing. Depending on the cost of innovation, licensing may either increase or reduce the strength of the patent protection. We thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies...

We analyze an alternating offer bargaining game between a developing country (South) and a multinational over entry to sell a patented product where the South can issue a compulsory license if an agreement is not reached by a deadline. The presence of international price spillovers introduces two novel features: (i) the surplus from entry prior to the deadline may be negative and (ii) Compulsor...

A recent conference at the University of Hong Kong just prior to the December 2005 World Trade Organization (WTO) talks renewed attention on the WTO's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), in particular in relation to China. Here we provide an introduction to TRIPS, discuss compulsory licensing, and take two angles to view how TRIPS affects the supply and d...

The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) provides the campus community, including the main campus and three regional sites, with a local MEDLINE option through a GRATEFUL MED fixed-fee licensing agreement with the National Library of Medicine. Searching is available via the Internet. A password server and customized GRATEFUL MED clients were built in order to adapt this off-the-shelf product...

Previous literature has mostly considered R&D and licensing activities separately. In this paper we examine the effect of licensing on R&D and social welfare. We show that the effect of licensing on the incentive for doing R&D is ambiguous and depends on the costs of doing R&D. We also show that the possibility of licensing can change the identity of the innovating firm. However, we find that s...