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.     

New product introduction with costly search

In the usual model of product market search, a low search cost can turn out to have detrimental incentives on new product introduction as the low search cost erodes firms’ market power, attenuating the profit from innovation. This paper studies a model of monopolistic competition with costly search, where the point of departure is that of a fixed cost of initiating search. In this environment, a low search cost could turn out to be favorable to innovation. At a low search cost, more consumers may decide to start searching, possibly resulting in higher profits for firms in the larger market, despite the erosion of market power.     

Private law enforcement with competing groups

This paper introduces groups that are in conflict against each other in law enforcement policy. These groups can have an effect on the process of law enforcement by making upfront investments, such as bribes. We also investigate consequences when a policy maker acts to maximize a bribe instead of social welfare. Thus, this paper presents an inclusive framework for incorporating private law enforcement, corruption and avoidance activities. This article shows that this competition can lead to moderate and more efficient law enforcement activities. This indicates that inefficient law enforcement by authority with harm reduction motivation can be avoided. Additionally, this paper shows that depending on the policy maker’s objection between rent-seeking motivation or social welfare maximizer, deterrence effects vary. This paper provides a clear mechanism that the rent-seeking motivated policy maker tends to set less severe enforcement policies than the social welfare level.     

Persuasion under costly learning

A Sender (seller) tries to persuade a rationally inattentive Receiver (buyer) to take a particular action (e.g., buying). Learning is costly for the Receiver who can choose to process strictly less information than what the sender provides. In a binary-action binary-state model, we show that optimal disclosure involves information distortion, but to a lesser extent than the case without learning costs; meanwhile, the Receiver processes less information than what he would under full disclosure. We also find that the Receiver can leverage his potential inattention to attain a higher equilibrium payoff than the perfectly attentive case. While the Sender is always worse off when facing a less attentive Receiver, the amount of information processed in equilibrium varies with learning costs in a non-monotone fashion.     

Efficiency and information aggregation in auctions with costly information

Consider an auction in which k identical objects are sold to n > k bidders who each have a value for one object which can have both private and common components to it. Private information concerning the common component of the object is not exogenously given, but rather endogenous and bidders face a cost to becoming informed. If the cost of information is not prohibitively high, then the equilibrium price in a uniform price auction will not aggregate private information, in contrast to the costless information case. Moreover, for a wide class of auctions if the cost of information is not prohibitively high then the objects can only be allocated in a weakly efficient sense, and then only if the equilibrium proportion of endogenously informed agents is vanishing as the economy grows. In spite of these results, it is shown that there is a mechanism for which there exist equilibria and for which (weak) efficiency is achieved as the economy grows in the face of endogenous information acquisition.Received: 6 August 2001, Accepted: 27 July 2002, JEL Classification: C72, D44, D82Financial support under NSF grant SBR-9507912 is gratefully acknowledged. I thank Valentina Bali for conversations out of which this project grew, and Larry Ausubel for a very helpful discussion of an early version of this paper at the 1998 summer meetings of the Econometric Society from which I have borrowed in structuring the exposition of the paper. I also thank Andy Postlewaite, Jeroen Swinkels, and an associate editor and anonymous referee for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts.     

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.     

Stochastic costly state verification and dynamic contracts

I consider a dynamic costly state verification environment in which a risk-averse agent enters into a contract with a risk-neutral principal. The agent has random income which is unknown to the principal but can be verified at a cost. The principal can commit to executing random verifications.I extend the standard recursive methods to study the problem and show that it is optimal to set verification probabilities strictly less than 1. If the agent׳s absolute risk aversion declines sufficiently slowly, the principal will use verification regardless of its cost. If the agent's income is verified then he would get consumption and continuation utility strictly higher than if his income were not verified.     

An Analysis of Pure-Revenue Technology Licensing

This paper analyzes the incentives of patentholders to license their technologies for pure-revenue reasons. We hypothesize that this decision is mainly driven by characteristics of the innovation, which determine its technological attractiveness, the relevance of transaction costs in its transfer and the importance of the competition effect. By using the NBER Patent Citations Database and an original dataset of patented technologies devoted to license in an Internet marketplace, we find that importance, innovativeness, fit into the firm's core and scope of the innovation affect the patentholder's willingness to license it. Results increase our awareness on the drivers of technology licensing decisions.     

论体育特许产品经营的市场营销价值及其与体育赞助的异同

本文通过对体育特许产品经营价值的分析和体育特许产品经营与体育赞助活动异同的分析为从事相关行业的经营管理者提供参考。     

Optimal disclosure of costly information packages in auctions

In an independent, private values, second-price auction with entry fees we discuss the way in which a seller should optimally spread costly information among the bidders. We find that marginal gross revenues do not generally behave monotonically in total information release. In the two bidder case, essentially, any asymmetric allocation of information dominates the symmetric information allocation. Even the bidder who gets less information is willing to pay a higher entry fee for asymmetric information allocations than for the symmetric one. His entry fee coincides with that of the better informed bidder. Losses from allocating an amount of information non-optimally can be substantial.     

Frequent probabilistic punishment in law enforcement

Timing and frequency of punishment are critical elements in law enforcement. Previous studies suggest the superiority of immediate punishment schemes over delayed punishment, as well as the importance of frequent punishment. Yet law enforcement schemes which utilize both frequent and immediate punishment are often cost prohibitive. In this work, we propose the “bad lottery immediate punishment” as an effective substitute to immediate punishment. This is a punishment mechanism that signals immediately to an offender that his violation has been spotted, but the actual penalty is delayed and probabilistic. We discuss implications in law enforcement, where probabilistic punishment is potentially more cost effective. Received: May 2000 / Acccepted: December 2000     

Adverse selection and costly information acquisition in asset markets

We develop an asset exchange model with adverse selection and costly information acquisition incentives. A seller of an asset knows the true value of the asset, while a buyer can obtain information about the asset’s quality at a cost. An equilibrium offer is pooling, but a buyer can purchase only good assets after producing the costly information about the asset’s quality. When the probability that the seller holds good assets is above the threshold value, a trade can occur with and without information acquisition, depending on the information acquisition cost, and the trade volume and social welfare are higher in equilibrium without information production than in equilibrium with information production. When the probability of facing good assets is below the threshold value, a trade occurs only after screening the quality of assets, and, hence, the market collapses if the information acquisition cost is sufficiently high. As the information acquisition cost increases, social welfare can increase or decrease depending on the probability of facing good and bad assets.     

Optimal capital accumulation under price uncertainty and costly reversibility

We consider the optimal capital accumulation policy of a competitive firm operating in the presence of decreasing returns to scale, price uncertainty, and costly reversibility of investment. We characterize the optimal accumulation policy and derive the value of the firm by focusing on the marginal investment decision and solving the associated optimal timing problem characterizing the option value of the associated opportunity to either disinvest or acquire a marginal unit of capacity. We also characterize the required exercise premia associated with the optimal policies and demonstrate that hysteresis prevails within this class of accumulation problems as well.     

Licensing a new product: Fee vs. royalty licensing with unionized labor market

In an economy with unionized labor market, we show that the payoff of an outside innovator may be higher under royalty licensing than under fixed-fee licensing and auction, if bargaining power of the labor union is sufficiently high. This result holds for both decentralized and centralized bargaining. It follows from our analysis that a combination of fixed-fee and output royalty can be preferable to the innovator compared to both royalty only licensing and auction (or fixed-fee licensing). We discuss the implications of positive opportunity costs of the licensees.     

Real options game analysis of sleeping patents

Using the real options game approach, we analyze the two-stage preemptive patent-investment race between an incumbent and a challenger (new entrant) in a product market with profit flow uncertainty. The challenger can gain entry into the monopolized product market dominated by the incumbent by patenting related technologies for a substitute product. To maintain its monopolized advantage, the incumbent has an incentive to block challenger’s entry by patenting the substitute product before the challenger. Either firm can pay an upfront fee to gain an immediate acquisition of the patent and subsequently holding the real option to develop the new substitute product. Under our simplified real options game model, there is no potential patent litgation risk. Also, the costs of holding the patent, like the payment of annual fees, are taken to be zero. We provide a full characterization of the optimal strategies adopted by the incumbent and challenger firm in this asymmetric patent-investment race. In particular, we examine the phenomena of sleeping patent, where the patented product is not launched immediately into the product market.     

微波炉中国专利申请状况概述

文章从专利申请的时间分布、申请人国别分布、主要申请人分布,对微波炉领域的中国专利申请状况进行了统计与分析,并从外形、操作方式、功能模式、加热控制、微波炉的集成化一体化等方面总结了微波炉的专利技术概况,为相关企业在确定研究方向和专利布局上提供参考。     

Rational expectations equilibrium and the strategic choice of costly information

This paper studies costly information acquisition in one-good production economies when agents acquire private information and prices transmit information. Before asset markets open, agents choose the quality of their private information. After this information stage, agents trade assets in sequentially complete markets taking into account their private information and the information revealed by equilibrium prices (rational expectations equilibrium, (Radner, R., 1979. Rational expectations equilibrium: generic existence and the information revealed by prices, Econometrica 47, 655–678.)). An overall equilibrium in asset and information market is defined as a Nash equilibrium of the information game in which agents’ actions are information choices and their utility payoffs are the ex-ante expected utilities of the corresponding rationale expectations equilibrium. This paper shows that for a generic set of economies parameterized by endowments and productivity shocks, an overall equilibrium in information and asset market (a Nash equilibrium of the induced information game) with costly information acquisition and fully-revealing prices exists. In other words, informational efficiency is in general consistent with costly information acquisition.     

Social norms,costly punishment and the evolution of cooperation

Within a co-evolutionary framework of reputations, strategies and social norms, we study the role of punishment in the promotion of cooperation. Norms differ according to whether they allow or do not allow the punishment action to be a part of the strategies, and, in the case of the former, they further differ in terms of whether they encourage or do not encourage the punishment action. In such a framework, depending on the applied social norm, players are first given different reputations based on their employed strategies. Players then update their strategies accordingly after they observe the payoff differences among different strategies. Finally, over a longer horizon, the evolution of the social norms may be driven by the average payoffs of all members of the society. The strategy dynamics are articulated under different social norms. It is found that costly punishment does contribute to the evolution toward cooperation. Not only does the attraction basin of the cooperative evolutionary stable state become larger, but the speed of convergence to the CESS also becomes faster. These two properties are further enhanced if the punishment action is encouraged by the social norm.     

Competition in law enforcement and capital allocation

This paper studies inter-jurisdictional competition in the fight against crime and its impact on occupational choice and the allocation of capital. In a world where capital is mobile, jurisdictions are inhabited by individuals who choose to become either workers or criminals. Because the return of the two occupations depends on capital, and because investment in capital in a jurisdiction depends on its crime rate, there is a bi-directional relationship between capital investment and crime which may lead to capital concentration. By investing in costly law enforcement, a jurisdiction makes the choice of becoming a criminal less attractive, which in turn reduces the number of criminals and makes its territory more secure. This increased security increases the attractiveness of the jurisdiction for investors and this can eventually translate into more capital being invested. We characterize the Nash equilibria—some entailing a symmetric outcome, others an asymmetric one—and study their efficiency.     

Revenue collection and enforcement at parking lots

The use of machines instead of attendants to collect fees at parking lots can significantly reduce operating costs, but may create problems of enforcement with regard to delinquent parkers. By eliminating the need for attendants, coin-operated ticket dispensers reduce costs by $20,000 per year, plus $0.30 per vehicle parked. However, the number of people who buy insufficient time may rise to 30 percent, while the number who buy too much is less than 5 percent. These results depend on the level and chance of receiving a penalty, which ranges from a simple request for compensation, to threats of litigation, and finally the towing away and impounding of the vehicle. In general, a high penalty requires a lower frequency of enforcement, and hence is preferred from an economic standpoint. Public reaction to very high penalties, such as towing, has led some city governments to regulate the process by using their curb-meter patrolling staff to give out modest fines for overtime parking at privately-owned lots. The consequent loss of potential revenue to the owners has created problems of equity among the affected parties. A socially and economically more efficient solution would have the owner (or his agent) charge delinquent parkers a penalty of twice the daily parking fee, and tow away the vehicle only if a previous penalty has not been paid after appropriate notice.