Patent pendencies create uncertainty in research and development (R&D) collaboration agreements, resulting in a threat of expropriation of unprotected knowledge by potential partners, reduced bargaining power and enhanced search costs. In this paper, we show that depending of the type of partner uncertain intellectual property rights (IPR) lead to reduced collaboration between firms and may hin...

Scientific information comes in many sizes, types and levels of quality. Because of the diversity of the scientific information being published, different issues will arise in publishing different types of information electronically. In this paper, we will address issues related to electronic publication of large scientific data sets, a subset of scientific information often overlooked in discu...

This paper investigates the role of intellectual property rights (IPRs) in shaping the GSM industry. This industry is an example of a high-tech industry in which standards play a large role. In the process of designing the GSM standard, a lot of attention has been given to IPRs, mainly to avoid a situation in which a single IPR holder could hamper or even totally block the development of the st...

This article focuses on the interaction between intellectual property rights (IPRs) regimes and committee-based standards development organisations (SDOs) in terms of the commodification of knowledge. IPRs and SDOs are institutions that are designed to codify technical knowledge with quite different purposes though. The resulting documents describe a private right (patent) or a public good (a s...

We build a multi-sectoral North–South trade model to analyze international intellectual property rights (IPR) protection. By comparing the Nash equilibrium IPR protection standard of the South (the developing countries) with that of the North (the developed countries), we find that the former is naturally weaker than the latter. Moreover, we show that both regions can gain from an agreement tha...

With the advent of the knowledge economy, knowledge is the principal economic asset and its management and protection have become the cornerstones of an organization strategy. Due to the increasing importance of knowledge, private firms and public institutions such as universities, colleges and research institutes have discovered the importance of protecting and managing their intellectual prop...

While most countries have harmonized intellectual property rights (IPR) legislation, the dispute about the optimal level of IPR-enforcement remains. This paper develops an endogenous growth framework with two open economies satisfying the classical North-South assumptions to study (a) IPR-enforcement in a decentralized game and (b) the desired globally-harmonized IPR-enforcement of the two regi...

We consider a policy regime allowing academic institutions to grant industry the intellectual property rights (IPRs) over invention resulting from collaborations. If a firm plays an important role in generating an invention, the researcher offers the IPRs to the firm, as an incentive to collaborate. However, he retains certain domains where he can exploit an invention without having to apply fo...

The Project is being implemented by the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) and the secretariat of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) (Project Number INT/OT/1BH). The broad aim is to improve the understanding of intellectual property rights-related issues among developing countries and to assist them in building their capacity for ongo...

A medical prize fund could improve the financing of drug innovations A t Christmas, we traditionally retell Dickens's story of Scrooge, who cared more for money than for his fellow human beings. What would we think of a Scrooge who could cure diseases that blighted thousands of people's lives but did not do so? Clearly, we would be horrified. But this has increasingly been happening in the name...