 Patent pools and dynamic R&D incentivesVianney Dequiedt () and Bruno Versaevel International Review of Law and Economics, 2013, vol. 36, issue C, 59-69 Abstract: Patent pools are cooperative agreements between two or more firms to license their related patents as a bundle. In a continuous-time model of multistage innovations, we characterize firms’ incentives to perform R&D when they anticipate the possibility of starting a pool of complementary patents, which can be essential or nonessential. A coalition formation protocol leads the first innovators to start the pool immediately after they patent the essential technologies. The firms invest more than in the no-pool case and increase the speed of R&D for essential technologies as the number of patents progresses to the anticipated endogenous pool size, to the benefit of consumers. There is overinvestment in R&D compared to a joint profit-maximization benchmark. If firms anticipate the addition of nonessential patents to the pool they reduce their R&D efforts for the essential patents at each point in time, resulting in a slower time to market for the pooled technologies. Keywords: R&D races; Innovation; Licensing; Competition policy (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:irlaec:v:36:y:2013:i:c:p:59-69 DOI: 10.1016/j.irle.2013.04.009 Access Statistics for this article International Review of Law and Economics is currently edited by C. Ott, A. W. Katz and H-B. Schäfer More articles in International Review of Law and Economics from Elsevier |
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