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Working Paper
Patent licensing revisited: heterogeneous firms and product differentiation
In this paper we study the optimal licensing agreement between a patentholder of a cost-reducing innovation and firms that have heterogeneous uses for the new technology. We consider the case in which these firms are competitors in a downstream market. We extend the competition environment among the licensees beyond the Cournot/Bertrand models considered by the previous literature to a framework with differentiated products. We also assume that potential licensees have private information about the usefulness of the new technology. We characterize two purposes the optimal licensing contract ...
Working Paper
Strategic online-banking adoption
In this paper we study the determinants of banks? decision to adopt a transactional website for their customers. Using a panel of commercial banks in the United States for the period 2003-2005, we show that although bank-specific characteristics are important determinants of banks? adoption decision, competition plays a prominent role. The extent of competition is related to the geographical overlap of banks in different markets and their relative market share in terms of deposits. In more competitive markets banks are more likely to adopt earlier. Even more importantly, banks adopt earlier ...
Report
Rewarding sequential innovators: prizes, patents and buyouts
This paper presents a model of cumulative innovation where firms are heterogeneous in their research ability. We study the optimal reward policy when the quality of the ideas and their subsequent development effort are private information. The optimal assignment of property rights must counterbalance the incentives of current and future innovators. The resulting mechanism resembles a menu of patents that have infinite duration and fixed scope, where the latter increases in the value of the idea. Finally, we provide a way to implement this patent menu by using a simple buyout scheme: The ...