Patent Races with Dynamic Complementarity

Andrea Blasco

Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna

Abstract: Recent models of multi-stage R&D have shown that a system of weak intellectual property rights may lead to faster innovation by inducing firms to share intermediate technological knowledge. In this article I introduce a distinction between plain and sophisticated technological knowledge, which has not been noticed so far but plays a crucial role in determining how different appropriability rules affect the incentives to innovate. I argue that the positive effect of weak intellectual property regimes on the sharing of intermediate technological knowledge vanishes when technological knowledge is sophisticated, as is likely to be the case in many high tech industries.

JEL-codes: L10 O30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-pr~, nep-knm, nep-sbm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://amsacta.unibo.it/4508/1/WP733.pdf (application/pdf)

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:bol:bodewp:wp733

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna ().