WHAT DETERMINES FIRMS' CHOICES BETWEEN EX ANTE AND EX POST LICENSING AGREEMENTS?

Ralph Siebert

Journal of Competition Law and Economics, 2015, vol. 11, issue 1, 165-199

Abstract: I investigate whether licensing agreements are an appropriate tool for firms to resolve blocking and hold-up problems in high-tech industries. I use a novel and comprehensive database on licensing agreements as well as detailed firm-level information on revenues and patents in the semiconductor industry from 1989 to 1999. It would be interesting to evaluate the post-1999 time period, but data constraints prevent me from doing so. I estimate a bivariate probit model accounting for endogenous selection. I find that different types of licensing agreements, that is, ex ante and ex post licensing agreements, help firms eventually resolve realized blocking. Firms engage in licensing before inventing a new technology (ex ante licensing) if they believe competitors hold patents that can potentially block the commercialization of their technology. In contrast, firms engage in licensing after inventing the technology (ex post licensing) if other firms hold patents that block the commercialization of the technology. The estimation results also show that firms' activity in technology and product markets plays an important role in explaining choices between ex ante and ex post licensing agreements. It should be kept in mind that the semiconductor industry is high paced and the data patterns might have changed after 1999.

JEL-codes: L13 L49 L63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/joclec/nhv004 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jcomle:v:11:y:2015:i:1:p:165-199.

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Competition Law and Economics is currently edited by Nicholas Economides, Amelia Fletcher, Michal Gal, Damien Geradin, Ioannis Lianos and Tommaso Valletti

More articles in Journal of Competition Law and Economics from Oxford University Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().