Patent pools,litigation, and innovation

This article analyzes patent pools and their effects on litigation incentives, overall royalty rates, and social welfare when patent rights are probabilistic and can be invalidated in court. With probabilistic patents, the license fees reflect the strength of the patents. We show that patent pools of complementary patents can be used to discourage infringement by depriving potential licensees of the ability to selectively challenge patents and making them committed to a proposition of all‐or‐nothing in patent litigation. If patents are sufficiently weak, patent pools with complementary patents reduce social welfare as they charge higher licensing fees and chill subsequent innovation incentives.     

Bestimmungsfaktoren der Preisfairness von Lebensmitteldiscountern

Der folgende Beitrag untersucht, welche Faktoren die wahrgenommene Preisfairness von Lebensmitteldiscountern beeinflussen. Auf Basis theoretischer überlegungen und Befunden einer qualitativen Studie werden verschiedene Bestimmungsfaktoren der Preisfairness im Lebensmittelhandel identifiziert. Am Beispiel von zwei Warengruppen aus dem Frischebereich wird gezeigt, dass alle Bestimmungsfaktoren zumindest in bestimmten Segmenten die wahrgenommene Preisfairness von Discountern beeinflussen, jedoch in unterschiedlicher St?rke.     

EU agriculture: Reduced protection from exchange rate instability

In the past, the protection of agriculture in the EU from exchange rate instability was accomplished at the cost of confusing regulations, welfare losses and the discrimination of other sectors. Will the 1993 reform of the Agri-Monetary System, combined with wide 15% European Monetary System margins and the recent GATT agreement, lead to more efficiency in European agriculture?     

Export promotion in the context of technical cooperation

A large number of developing countries have introduced trade policy reforms in recent years. These have been supported by export promotion projects in the context of bilateral and multilateral development cooperation. The results of the advisory approach so far adopted have been disappointing on the whole, so a reorientation is now taking place in the design of export promotion. This article describes an alternative advisory approach by taking the Indo-German Export Promotion Project (IGEP) as an illustration.     

Evaluation of medical costs associated with use of new oral anticoagulants compared with standard therapy among venous thromboembolism patients

Objective:

This study evaluated differences in medical costs associated with clinical end-points from randomized clinical trials that compared the new oral anticoagulants (NOACs), dabigatran, rivaroxaban, apixaban, and edoxaban, to standard therapy for treatment of patients with venous thromboembolism (VTE).

Research design and methods:

Event rates of efficacy and safety end-points from the clinical trials (RE-COVER, RE-COVER II, EINSTEIN-Pooled, AMPLIFY, Hokusai-VTE trial) were obtained from published literature. Incremental annual medical costs among patients with clinical events from a US payer perspective were obtained from the literature or healthcare claims databases and inflation adjusted to 2013 costs. Differences in total medical costs associated with clinical end-points for the NOACs vs standard therapy were then estimated. One-way and Monte Carlo sensitivity analyses were carried out.

Results:

A lower rate of major bleedings was associated with use of any of the NOACs vs standard therapy. Except for dabigatran, use of NOACs was also associated with a lower rate of recurrent VTE/death. As a result of the reduction in clinical event rates, the overall medical cost differences were ?$146, ?$482, ?$918, and ?$344 for VTE patients treated with dabigatran, rivaroxaban, apixaban, and edoxaban, respectively, vs patients treated with standard therapy.

Conclusions:

When any of the four NOACs are used instead of standard therapy for acute VTE, treatment medical costs are reduced. Apixaban is associated with the greatest reduction in medical costs, which is driven by medical cost reductions associated with both efficacy and safety end-points. Further evaluation may be needed to validate these results in the real-world setting.     

The mover’s advantage: The superior performance of migrant scientists

Migrant scientists outperform domestic scientists. The result persists after instrumenting migration for reasons of work or study with migration in childhood to minimize the effect of selection. The results are consistent with theories of knowledge recombination and specialty matching.