The Inverse Cournot Effect in Royalty Negotiations with Complementary Patents

Gerard Llobet and Jorge Padilla

No 11624, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: It has been commonly argued that the decision of a large number of inventors to license complementary patents necessary for the development of a product leads to excessively large royalties. This well-known Cournot-complements or royalty-stacking effect would hurt efficiency and downstream competition. In this paper we show that when we consider patent litigation and introduce heterogeneity in the portfolio of different firms these results change substantially due to what we denote the Inverse Cournot effect. We show that the lower the total royalty that a downstream producer pays, the lower the royalty that patent holders restricted by the threat of litigation of downstream producers will charge. This effect generates a moderation force in the royalty that unconstrained large patent holders will charge that may overturn some of the standard predictions in the literature. Interestingly, though, this effect can be less relevant when all patent portfolios are weak making royalty stacking more important.

Keywords: Intellectual property; Standard setting organizations; Patent licensing; R&d investment; Patent pools (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L15 L24 O31 O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ind, nep-ino, nep-ipr and nep-mic
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Working Paper: The Inverse Cournot Effect in Royalty Negotiations with Complementary Patents (2016)
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