Protecting Early Innovators: Should Second-Generation Products Be Patentable?

Suzanne Scotchmer

RAND Journal of Economics, 1996, vol. 27, issue 2, 322-331

Abstract: Incentives to develop basic technologies are greater if the patentholder profits from applications or other second-generation products. Assuming that such products infringe the basic patent and that there is not much delay between the innovations, I argue that (i) patents on second-generation products are not necessary to encourage their development and (ii) the patentholder of the basic technology collects a larger share of the profit if applications or other second generation products are not patentable.

Date: 1996
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (190)

Downloads: (external link)
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0741-6261%2819962 ... O%3B2-8&origin=repec full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to JSTOR subscribers. See http://www.jstor.org for details.

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:rje:randje:v:27:y:1996:i:summer:p:322-331

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://editorialexp ... i-bin/rje_online.cgi

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in RAND Journal of Economics from The RAND Corporation
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().