Competing on Standards? Entrepreneurship,Intellectual Property,and Platform Technologies

Entrepreneurs often rely on intellectual property (IP) to earn a return on their innovations, and also compatibility standards, which allow them to supply specialized components for a shared technology platform. This paper compares the IP strategies of small entrepreneurs and large incumbents that disclose patents at 13 voluntary standard setting organizations (SSOs). These patents have a relatively high litigation rate. For small private firms, the probability of filing a lawsuit increases after disclosure to the SSO. For large public firms, the filing rate is unchanged. Although forward citations increase after disclosure for all firms, the size of this effect is the same for entrepreneurs and incumbents. These results suggest that standards increase the difference between large and small firms' incentives to litigate, rather than the relative value of their patents. We conclude that because specialized technology providers cannot seek rents in complementary markets, they defend IP more aggressively once it has been incorporated into an open platform.     

标准化组织专利政策采用事先披露原则的利弊分析及改进模式探讨

技术标准涉及专利的对外许可一直都是在标准制定完成之后由专利权人或标准化组织与使用方谈判确定。VITA推出的新专利政策中在世界范围内第一次采用了事先披露原则,要求专利权人在标准制定之前,不仅要披露专利信息,还需披露许可条件。虽然这一专利政策草案通过了美国司法部的反垄断审查,但依然引起广泛争议。本文对事先披露原则的利弊进行了分析,在此基础上探讨了对事先披露许可费模式的改进思路——由标准化组织事先披露总许可费率的模式。     

Licensing and innovation with imperfect contract enforcement

Licensing promotes technology transfer and innovation, but enforcement of licensing contracts is often imperfect. We model contract enforcement as a game with perfect information but probabilistic enforcement and explore the implications of weak enforcement on the design of licensing contracts, the conduct of firms, and market performance. An upstream firm develops a technology that it can license to downstream firms using a fixed fee and a per‐unit royalty. Strictly positive per‐unit royalties maximize the licensor's profit if competition among licensees limits joint profits. With imperfect enforcement, the licensor lowers variable royalties to avoid cheating. Although imperfect contract enforcement reduces the profits of the licensor, weak enforcement lowers prices, increases downstream innovation, and in some circumstances can increase total economic welfare.     

Opportunity Evaluation as Rule‐Based Decision Making

We draw from cognitive science literature on rule‐based thinking to develop and empirically test a theoretical framework of entrepreneurial opportunity evaluation. We argue that entrepreneurs make use of socially constructed rules to discern the attractiveness of an opportunity, for them, specifically. Using conjoint analysis data of 498 decisions made by 62 entrepreneurs, we find that entrepreneurs' use of rules regarding opportunity novelty, resource efficiency, and worst‐case scenario significantly influences entrepreneurs' evaluations of opportunities and that individual differences in opportunity market and technology knowledge augment the effect of the rules on opportunity attractiveness. Additionally, we document that the worst‐case scenario diminishes the positive effect of other rule criteria (e.g. novelty, resource efficiency) on opportunity evaluation and that market and technology knowledge further influence the negative effects of the worst‐case scenario.     

论会计准则制定导向的选择

会计准则制定导向问题是一个令人难以抉择的问题。本文在对现有几种会计准则制定导向观的分析中获得准则制定导向选择的恰当观点。笔者认为,具体的会计环境是准则制定导向选择的约束条件。随着约束条件的变化,准则制定导向的偏重点必然需要一定幅度的调整以适应环境的变化。我国会计准则的制定应该仍然以原则为指导,以规则为基础,从而制定出符合我国国情的高质量会计准则。     

Most-Favored-Customer Clauses and Multilateral Contracting: When Nondiscrimination Implies Uniformity

DeGraba and Postlewaite (1992) show that the seller of a durable input can solve the time inconsistency problem by offering most-favored-customer (MFC) protection to buyers. McAfee and Schwartz (1994) show that if a supplier sells inputs to competing firms using two-part tariffs, MFC protection that allows a firm to replace its contract with a contract executed by any other firm will not solve the commitment problem, and argue this implies managers cannot use MFCs as a strategic commitment device in complex contracting situations. This paper shows that if the profits of the seller and the buyers are monotonic in each term of the contract, then applying MFC protection to each term of a contract allows a manager to solve his commitment problem in complex contacting situations. We show that "standard" contract arrangements (two-part tariffs, declining block tariffs, and royalties as a percentage of sales) meet this condition.     

Research on extended external reporting assurance: Trends,themes, and opportunities

The assurance of non‐financial information (NFI) included in extended external reports (EERs) is a global activity that has far‐reaching consequences for business, investors, other stakeholders, and society. EERs remain largely unregulated with few standards. Along with our companion paper (Krasodomska, Simnett, & Street, 2021, Journal of International Financial Management and Accounting, 25, 209), we contribute to the current discussion on EER assurance by providing an overview of the academic literature to inform the standard setting initiatives of the International Auditing and Assurance Standard Setting Board (IAASB), as well as the practice of assurance of EERs. We identify 121 articles on extended external reporting (EER) assurance published between 2009 and 2020 across 35 journals ranked A*, A, and B on the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) 2019 Journal Quality List. These articles cover archival, experimental, interviews, case studies, surveys, and content analysis research methods and serve as a possible input for standard setting activities. We document a rapid increase in this literature with almost half of the articles published in the last 3 years, 2018 to 2020. Finally, we offer ideas for future research directly linked to the proposed Guidance of the IAASB on EER assurance. We encourage researchers to engage in these and other issues of the IAASB’s Guidance to assist them with valuable input for their standard setting activities.     

Determinants of materiality disclosure quality in integrated reporting: Empirical evidence from an international setting

This study examines determinants of materiality disclosure quality (MDQ) in integrated reporting (IR) in an international setting. To this purpose, we constructed a novel, hand‐collected MDQ score in line with the <IR> guiding principles introduced by the International Integrated Reporting Council. On the basis of a cross‐national sample consisting of 359 firm‐year observations between 2013 and 2016, we find that MDQ is positively associated with learning effects, gender diversity, and the assurance of nonfinancial information in the integrated report. On the other hand, we find that IR readability, listing in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, and earnings management do not affect MDQ. Our results are robust to different statistical models. We expand on earlier empirical findings on IR disclosure quality and provide valuable insights for research, practice, and standard setting.     

论“目标导向”会计准则及其借鉴意义

美国证券交易委员会在根据《萨班斯一奥克斯利法案》完成的会计准则研究报告中,提出了准则的制定应当坚持“目标导向”,并详细说明了“目标导向”准则的关键特征。“目标导向”准则重新强调了会计目标统一和会计准则理论框架的重要性,并将职业判断的责任由准则制定者回移给会计师和审计师,通过市场约束机制维护会计信息质量。这对我国会计准则模式选择、财务概念框架建设和会计信息的市场机制完善等方面都有很好的借鉴意义。     

企业实施技术标准战略研究

广西南宁市启动重要技术标准研究,实施技术标准战略以来,企业参与标准研制的成果丰硕,品牌兴企成效显著,技术标准体系建设得到有效夯实。为进一步推进企业实施技术标准战略工作,文章针对当前相当一部分企业仍存在对实施技术标准战略重要性认识不足、重视不够、人才相对匮乏、经费投入过少、标准体系不完善等问题,提出了发挥企业实施技术标准战略主体作用的对策。     

企业实施技术标准战略研究

广西南宁市启动重要技术标准研究,实施技术标准战略以来,企业参与标准研制的成果丰硕,品牌兴企成效显著,技术标准体系建设得到有效夯实。为进一步推进企业实施技术标准战略工作,文章针对当前相当一部分企业仍存在对实施技术标准战略重要性认识不足、重视不够、人才相对匮乏、经费投入过少、标准体系不完善等问题,提出了发挥企业实施技术标准战略主体作用的对策。     

Innovation policy within private collectives: Evidence on 3GPP׳s regulation mechanisms to facilitate collective innovation

This article provides insights on how to manage collective innovation in the digital economy, an innovation regime which is riddled with complex regulatory challenges and increasing litigation over intellectual property rights. Private collective organizations face two main challenges: (1) to promote collective innovation while preserving the private interests of the firms within the collective, and (2) to ensure that collective innovation does not weaken healthy competition. Through a case study of the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), an exemplary private collective federation of organizations composed of standardization bodies, industry consortia and technology producers, we identify organizational solutions to these challenges. We find that a combination of specific IP rights instruments is key to manage these trade-offs. We also find that the combined policies of essential patenting, FRAND, and maximum royalty rate help overcome the specific challenges associated with collective innovation within competitive contexts. Finally we discuss the implications of our findings for managers and for policy.     

Patent Licensing Under Strategic Delegation

The modern corporation is characterized both by a separation of ownership from management and by managerial incentives that often include strategic elements in addition to the standard incentive elements. Despite the importance of these two features in the agency and corporate-governance literatures, they are absent in the treatment of the firm in the patent-licensing literature. The analysis in this paper shows how, by simply taking into account these two features of the modern corporation, it is possible to offer a new explanation for the use of royalties in licensing agreements.     

Heterogeneous wage setting and endogenous macro volatility

In order to strengthen the debate on the foundations of aggregate business cycles, the science of macroeconomics has recently benefited from a series of contributions that emphasize the complex nature of collective human action. Progressively, agent heterogeneity, local interaction, sentiment formation and out-of-equilibrium dynamics are becoming central pieces on the analysis of short-term business fluctuations. This paper offers a contribution to this new literature by exploring a macro framework where endogenous fluctuations emerge regardless from the occurrence of shocks to technology or preferences. The proposed setting separates firms into two groups, which follow different wage setting strategies. The firms may systematically change from one class of wage setters to the other following local interaction rules and by making a global assessment of the profitability of each of the wage setting alternatives. Under reasonable parameterizations, long-term large periodicity cycles are generated; these cycles might constitute a meaningful component of the observed output gap and price level volatility, a component that complements the typical view on exogenous disturbances over an otherwise stable economy.     

Competing for Consumers with Self‐Control Problems

I examine strategic implications of competing for consumers with self‐control problems. For investment goods, like health clubs, I find that the equilibrium sign‐up (lump‐sum) fees decrease when competition intensifies, similarly to prices in standard oligopoly models. However, the equilibrium attendance (per‐unit) price increases due to firms' deteriorated ability to take advantage of consumers' self‐control problems. Moreover, firms earn less profit due to consumers' self‐control problems—the firms have a unilateral incentive to charge per‐unit fees lower than the marginal cost; however, they cannot make up the lost margins by increasing the lump‐sum fee, due to competition. I also show that for plausible parameter regions the market adjusts to consumers' self‐control problem in such a way that firms play the standard equilibrium strategies that they would have engaged in with fully rational consumers, with identical market outcomes. Most of the results are qualitatively the same for leisure goods (for example, credit cards); however, some results are reversed: the per‐unit fees are higher than marginal cost and decrease as competition intensifies.     

Equity–Efficiency Optimizing Resource Allocation: The Role of Time Preferences in a Repeated Irrigation Game

We study repeated water allocation decisions among small scale irrigation users in Tanzania. In a treatment replicating water scarcity conditions, convexities in production make that substantial efficiency gains can be obtained by deviating from equal sharing, leading to an equity–efficiency trade‐off. In a repeated game setting, it becomes possible to reconcile efficiency with equity by rotating the person who receives the largest share, but such a strategy requires a longer run perspective. Correlating experimental data from an irrigation game with individual time preference data, we find that less patient irrigators are less likely to use a rotation strategy.     

All-Units Discounts in Retail Contracts

All-units discounts in retail contracts refer to discounts that lower a retailer's wholesale price on every unit purchased when the retailer's purchases equal or exceed some quantity threshold. These discounts pose a challenge to economic theory because it is difficult to understand why a manufacturer ever would charge less for a larger order if its intentions were benign. In this paper, we show that all-units discounts may profitably arise absent any exclusionary motive. All-units discounts eliminate double marginalization in a complete information setting, and they extract more profit than would a menu of two-part tariffs in the standard incomplete information setting with two types of buyers. All-units discounts may improve or may reduce welfare (relative to menus of two-part tariffs) depending on demand parameters .     

Hungary's entry into the euro area: Lessons for prospective members from a monetary policy perspective

This paper evaluates the conduct of monetary policy in Hungary using standard Taylor rules as well as extended rules that incorporate real exchange rate effects. Moreover, we explicitly consider the impact of future euro area entry by estimating instrument rules that permit an influence from Maastricht Treaty inflation requirements via the estimation of Markov switching models as well as by estimating a differential rule vis-à-vis the existing euro area. Lastly, the paper also considers the impact on policy rules from the large data revision that affects real exchange rate and output estimates. I find that interest rate setting behavior in Hungary does not resemble that of the euro area. Also, counterfactual experiments reveal that the potential macroeconomic costs of entry into the euro area sooner rather than later may be lower than if membership in the single currency area is delayed beyond 2008.     

LEARNING WITH FIXED RULES: THE MINORITY GAME

Abstract This paper gives a critical account of the literature on adaptive behaviour in the minority game, a simple congestion game. The literature has proposed a model which differs markedly from many standard learning models in that players are endowed with a fixed subset of behavioural rules or response modes which map the observed history to actions. These rules need not have a behavioural interpretation or be derived from some form of optimizing behaviour. Nonetheless, this model gives rise to behaviour that is close to equilibrium behaviour at the aggregate level. The individual‐level behaviour predicted by the model seems to capture some aspects of observed experimental behaviour that are difficult to explain using standard models.     

Team Incentives under Relative Performance Evaluation

This paper examines the optimal provision of incentives in the repeated setting with many agents under the restriction that only relative performance evaluation is feasible for contracting. We show that the optimal contract in the repeated setting may take a different form than that in the static setting. In the repeated setting, it may be optimal for the principal to arbitrarily divide the agents into teams and compensate them based on team ranking, as it allows the principal to motivate the agents through peer sanctions. The situation draws a clear contrast to the static setting where such a strategy is never optimal. The result indicates that the concept of team plays an important role in the repeated setting even when performances can only be evaluated in relative terms.