Mitigating "Anticommons" Harms to Science and Technology Research

Paul David

No 10-030, Discussion Papers from Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: There are three analytically distinct layers of the phenomenon that has been labeled “the anticommons” and indicted as a potential impediment to innovation resulting from patenting and enforcement of IPR obtained on academic research results. This paper distinguishes among “search costs”, “transactions costs”, and “multiple marginalization” effects in the pricing of licenses for commercial use of IP, and examines the distinctive resource allocation problems arising from each when exclusion rights over research inputs are distributed among independent owners. Where information use-rights are gross complements (either in production or consumption), multiple marginalization—seen here to be the core of the “anticommons” – is likely to result in extreme forms of “royalty stacking” that can pose serious impediments to R&D projects. The practical consequences, particularly for exploratory scientific research (contrasted with commercially-oriented R&D) are seen from a heuristic analysis of the effects of distributed ownership of scientific and technical database rights. A case is presented for the contractual construction of “research resource commons” designed as efficient IPR pools, as the preferable response to the anticommons.

Keywords: law and economics; IPR; licensing; anticommons; patent hold-ups; royalty stacking; database rights; contractual commons; efficient pools (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L24 O31 O34 O38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-pr~, nep-ppm and nep-tid
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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