Economics of Intellectual Property

Bibliography

• Philippe Aghion, Nick Bloom, Richard Blundell, Rachel Griffith, and Peter Howitt. Competition and Innovation: An Inverted-U Relationship. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 120(2):701-728, May 2005.
  • IP discourages laggard firms from innovating, encourages neck-and-neck firms to innovate
• Phillipe Aghion and Peter Howitt. Endogenous Growth Theory. MIT, 1998.
  • survey of current debates in economic growth theory. Could be useful as a primer for understanding these economic papers
• George A. Akerlof, Kenneth J. Arrow, Timothy Bresnahan, James M. Buchanan, Ronald Coase, Linda R. Cohen, Milton Friedman, Jerry R. Green, Robert W. Hahn, Thomas W. Hazlett, C. Scott Hemphill, Robert E. Litan, Roger G. Noll, Richard L. Schmalensee, Steven Shavell, Hal R. Varian, and Richard J. Zeckhauser. The Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998: An Economic Analysis, 5 2002. Brief 02-1
  • Famous economists weigh in on copyright term extension. Conclusion: life + 70 years unlikely to encourage innovation.
• Juan Alcacer and Michelle Gittelman. Patent Citations as a Measure of Knowledge Flows: The Influence of Examiner Citations. Review of Economics and Statistics, (88(4)), 2006.
  • We cannot reasonably use patent citations as a method for gauging innovation

• Richard Atkinson et al., "Public Sector Collaboration for Agricultural IP Management," Science 301 (2003): 174.
  • Plan for the UC system on encouraging IP innovation

• Bharat N Anand and Tarun Khanna. The Structure of Licensing Contracts. Journal of Industrial Economics, 48(1):103-35, March 2000.
  • empirical investigation as to different licensing practices across fields. Explain differences in terms of different IP regimes
• James J Anton and Dennis A Yao. Expropriation and Inventions: Appropriable Rents in the Absence of Property Rights. The American Economic Review, 84(1):190-209, March 1994.
  • Theoretical behavior of inventors in a world with weak or non-existent patent protection
• James J Anton and Dennis A Yao. The Sale of Ideas: Strategic Disclosure, Property Rights, and Contracting. The Review of Economic Studies, 69(3):513-531, July 2002.
  • Investigates in part how secrecy and incomplete disclosure can function in place of an intellectual property regime. Do any of the industries we investigate function this way?
• A. Arundel and I. Kabla. What Percentage of Innovations are Patented? Empirical Estimates for European Firms. Research Policy, 27:127-141, 1998.
  • shows quantitatively that some industries (e.g. pharmaceuticals) patent more than others

• Yochai Benkler, "Commons Based Strategies and the Problems of Patents," Science 305 (2004): 1110.
  • Advocates using commons-based peer production in IP-dependent biotechnology industries`

• James Bessen and Eric Maskin. Sequential Innovation, Patents, and Imitation, 2000. Working paper (MIT Econ WP 00-01).
  • models innovation in low-IP fields such as software and semiconductors.
• Stephen Breyer. The Uneasy Case for Copyright: A Study of Copyright in Books, Photocopies, and Computer Programs. Harvard Law Review, 84(2):281-351, 1970.
  • reviews some of the legal and moral arguments for copyright, as well as some of the simple economic claims for and against copyright and its extension
• Howard F Chang. Patent Scope, Antitrust Policy, and Cumulative Innovation. The RAND Journal of Economics, 26(1):34-57, 1995.
  • argues that patentees should be given broad protection against those who might want to patent similar products with slight improvements
• Shubham Chaudhuri, Pinelopi K. Goldberg, and Panle Jia. Estimating the Effects of Global Patent Protection in Pharmaceuticals: A Case Study of Quinolones in India. The American Economic Review, 96(5):1477-1514, December 2006.
  • empirical evidence suggests that strict patent protection will hurt welfare for the very poor, (if not innovation generally)
• CIPIL. Review of the Economic Evidence Relating to an Extension of the Term of Copyright in Sound Recordings, 12 2006. Prepared for the Gowers Review on Intellectual Property.
  • General arguments against copyright extension in the european music industry, with a focus on trade benefits
• W. Cohen, R. Nelson, and P. Walsh. Protecting Their Intellectual Assets: Appropriability Conditions and Why U.S. Manufacturing Firms Patent (or Not), 2000. NBER Working Paper No. W7552.
  • Manufacturing firms often use secrecy instead of patents to protect innovations. Often use patents to prevent other firms from innovating
• Francesca Cornelli and Mark Schankerman. Patent Renewals and R&D Incentives. The RAND Journal of Economics, 30(2):197-213, 1999.
  • Patent regimes should be shorter for low productivity regimes, longer for high productivity regimes
• William Cornish and David Llewelyn. Patents, Copyrights, Trade Marks and Allied Rights. Sweet and Maxwell, London, 5th edition, 2003.
  • useful primer on english IP law
• Partha Dasgupta. Patents, Priority and Imitation or, the Economics of Races and Waiting Games. The Economic Journal, 98(389):66-80, March 1988.
  • historical review of the economic literature on growth. Suggests the direction in which economists are generally gesturing
• Partha Dasgupta, Richard Gilbert, and Joseph Stiglitz. Strategic Considerations in Invention and Innovation: The Case of Natural Resources. Econometrica, 51(5):1439-1448, September 1983.
  • patent holders might set prices high in order to deter innovation
• Vincenzo Denicolo. Patent Races and Optimal Patent Breadth and Length. The Journal of Industrial Economics, 44(3):249-265, September 1996.
  • less efficient markets will need stronger patent protections
• Avinish Dixit. A General Model of R&D Competition and Policy. The RAND Journal of Economics, 19(3):317-326, 1988.
  • market equlibria for an invention will rarely equal the social good produced
• R. Eisenberg and M. Heller. Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research. Science, 280(5364):690-701, 5 1998.
  • investigating biomedical field, argues that property rights spread among too many owners will deter innovation
• Mukesh Eswaran and Nancy Gallini. Patent Policy and the Direction of Technological Change. The RAND Journal of Economics, 27(4):722-746, 1996.
  • Patent breadth should be refocused to encourage people to patent more process innovations and fewer product innovations
• Dominique Foray. The Economics of Knowledge. MIT, 2004.
  • Basic economics of economic growth
• Chien fu Chou and Oz Shy. The Crowding-Out Effects of Long Duration of Patents. The RAND Journal of Economics, 24(2):304-312, 1993.
  • long-term patents encourage formation of large firms, discourage investment in innovation by future generations
• Drew Fudenberg, Richard Gilbert, Joseph Stiglitz, and Jean Tirole. Preemption, leapfrogging and competition in patent races. European Economic Review, 22(1):3-31, June 1983.
  • theories as to when patent races will remain competitive, and when they will degenerate into monopoly
• Nancy Gallini. Patent Policy and Costly Imitation. Rand Journal of Economics, 23(1):52-63, 1992.
  • discusses possibility of extensive patent lengths forcing inventors to «innovate around» current patents, thereby making patents less valuable
• Nancy Gallini and Suzanne Scotchmer. Intellectual Property: When is it the Best Incentive System? Levine's Working Paper Archive 618897000000000532, UCLA Department of Economics, October 2003.
  • reviews standard issues involved in defining optimal patent terms and breadth. Also discusses possible alternatives to IP regimes
• Nancy T Gallini. Deterrence by Market Sharing: A Strategic Incentive for Licensing. The American Economic Review, 74(5):931-941, December 1984.
  • incumbents might license technologies so that competitors might not develop their own, better products
• Nancy T Gallini. The Economics of Patents: Lessons from Recent U.S. Patent Reform. The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16(2):131-154, 2002.
  • study of optimal patent law with an historical focus and special attention to administrative, legal, and transaction costs
• Nancy T Gallini and Ralph A Winter. Licensing in the Theory of Innovation. The RAND Journal of Economics, 16(2):237-252, 1985.
  • investigates the incentives to license patented technologies and its effects on long-term innovation
• Richard Gilbert and Carl Shapiro. Optimal Patent Length and Breadth. The RAND Journal of Economics, 21(1):106-112, 1990.
  • trade-off between patent length and breadth in developing the optimal patent system
• Richard J. Gilbert and Michael L. Katz. Should Good Patents Come in Small Packages?A Welfare Analysis of Intellectual Property Bundling. Technical report, November 2003.
  • licensing patents in bundles is more likely to increase innovation that licensing patents individually
• Richard J Gilbert and David M. G Newbery. Preemptive Patenting and the Persistence of Monopoly. The American Economic Review, 72(3):514-526, June 1982.
  • discusses the incentives for, and creates a general model of, preemptive patenting
• Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini. Pay Enough or Don't Pay at All. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 115:791-810, August 2000.
  • Introducing money into various practices can hurt players' performance
• Z. Griliches, Industry Effects and Appropriability Measures in the Stock Market's Valuation of R&D and Patents. The American Economic Review, Vol. 78, No. 2, 1988.
  • Empirical survey showing patents have different levels of effectiveness in different industries
• Bronwyn Hall and Rosemarie Ziedonis. The patent paradox revisited: an empirical study of patenting in the U.S. semiconductor industry, 1979-1995. Rand Journal of Economics, 32(1):101-128, 2001.
  • tries to explain the recent rise in patenting within the semiconductor industry
• Elhanan Helpman. Innovation, Imitation, and Intellectual Property Rights. Econometrica, 61(6):1247-1280, November 1993.
  • examines intellectual property by defining it in terms of 4 qualities: terms of trade, production and composition, available products, intertemporal allocation of consumption
• Hugo Hopenhayn, Gerard Llobet, and Matthew Mitchell. Rewarding Sequential Innovators: Prizes, Patents, and Buyouts. Journal of Political Economy, 114(6):1041-1068, December 2006.
  • Optimal patent should be a sliding scale depending on the importance of the discovery
• Ignatius Horstmann, Glenn M MacDonald, and Alan Slivinski. Patents as Information Transfer Mechanisms: To Patent or (Maybe) Not to Patent. Journal of Political Economy, 93(5):837-58, October 1985.
  • Firms will generally patent only a small fraction of its innovations
• Robert M. Hunt. When Do More Patents Reduce R&D? American Economic Review, 96(2):87-91, May 2006.
  • firms will only patent only if there is significant overlap with competitors' works
• Adam B. Jaffe. The U.S. patent system in transition: policy innovation and the innovation process. Research Policy, 29(4-5):531-557, April 2000.
  • discusses why we have failed to reach strong conclusions about the optimal term for copyright, and possible avenues for further investigation
• Michael L Katz and Carl Shapiro. On the Licensing of Innovations. The RAND Journal of Economics, 16(4):504-520, 1985.
  • possibility of licensing will sometimes decrease returns to innovation
• Edmund W Kitch. The Nature and Function of the Patent System. Journal of Law and Economics, 20(2):265-290, October 1977.
  • patents increase the output from from resources used for technological innovation
• Paul Klemperer. How Broad Should the Scope of Patent Protection Be? RAND Journal of Economics, 21(1):113-130, 1990.
  • general discussion on the trade-off between patent length and patent beadth
• William Landes and Richard Posner. Indefinitely Renewable Copyright. University of Chicago Law Review, 70(471), 2003.
  • discusses the possibility of indefinitely renewable (as opposed to infinite or fixed-term) copyrights
• Jean Olson Lanjouw. Patent Protection in the Shadow of Infringement: Simulation Estimations of Patent Value. The Review of Economic Studies, 65(4):671-710, October 1998.
  • Empirical investigation of the value of patent system
• Josh Lerner. An Empirical Exploration of a Technology Race. The RAND Journal of Economics, 28(2):228-247, 1997.
  • investigation into whether technology leaders tend to maintain their advantage
• Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole. Efficient Patent Pools. American Economic Review, 94(3):691-711, June 2004.
  • theoretical model of efficient patent pools.
• Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole. The Economics of Technology Sharing: Open Source and Beyond. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19(2):99-120, Spring 2005.
  • theoretical model of open source sharing

• Josh Lerner, Patent Protection and Innovation Over 150 Years (working paper no. 8977, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2002).
  • country-by-country comparison of patent policy and innnovation

• Richard C Levin. A New Look at the Patent System. The American Economic Review, 76(2, Papers and Proceedings of the Ninety-Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association):199-202, May 1986.
  • failure of the patent system to confer perfect appropriability to the patent system]
• C. Macleod. The Paradoxes Of Patenting: Invention And Its Diffusion In 18th And 19th Century Britain, France And North America. Technology and Culture, 32:885-910, 1991.
  • historical perspective on patent appropriability

• Elliot Marshall, "A Deal for the Rice Genome," Science 296 (April 2002): 34
  • review of news on golden rice news

• Carmen Matutes, Pierre Regibeau, and Katharine Rockett. Optimal Patent Design and the Diffusion of Innovations. The RAND Journal of Economics, 27(1):60-83, 1996.
  • extensive patent scope, not breadth, is the best way to encourage firms to publicize innovation
• Robert Merges and Richard Nelson. On the Complex Economics of Patent Scope. Columbia Law Review, 90:839-916, 5 1990.
  • general analysis of the economics of patent scope

• Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors, ed. Richard R. Nelson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 616-617.
  • Early investigation into economic models of growth

• Ian Novos and Michael Waldman. The Effects of Increased Copyright Protection: An Analytic Approach. Journal of Political Economy, 92(2):236-246, 1984.
  • increased copyright term will cause underproduction, but not necessarily underutilization
• Rufus Pollock. Innovation and Imitation with and without Intellectual Property Rights. MPRA Paper 5025, University Library of Munich, Germany, September 2006.
  • Innovation will continue to occur without IP through first-mover advantages
• Rufus Pollock. Optimal Copyright Over Time: Technological Change and the Stock of Works. Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues, 4(2):51-64, December 2007.
  • technological innovation will shorten the length of optimal copyright
• E. Rappaport. Copyright Term Extension: Estimating the Economic Values. Technical report, Congressional Research Service, May 1998.
  • reviews the basic economics of copyright law
• Mariko Sakakibara and Lee Branstetter. Do Stronger Patents Induce More Innovation? Evidence from the 1988 Japanese Patent Law Reforms. The RAND Journal of Economics, 32(1):77-100, 2001.
  • Focus on empirical evidence in the Japanese patent reforms
• Mark Schankerman. How Valuable is Patent Protection? Estimates by Technology Field. The RAND Journal of Economics, 29(1):77-107, 1998.
  • Empirical study focusing on the French patent industry
• Suzanne Scotchmer. Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Cumulative Research and the Patent Law. The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 5(1):29-41, 1991.
  • models possibility of patent protections to encourage subsequent innovations
• Suzanne Scotchmer. On the Optimality of the Patent Renewal System. The RAND Journal of Economics, 30(2):181-196, 1999.
  • model showing that patent renewals rarely make sense
• Suzanne Scotchmer. Innovation and Incentives. MIT, 2004.
  • Textbook on economics of innovation. This might be a good introductory text
• Paul S Segerstrom. Innovation, Imitation, and Economic Growth. The Journal of Political Economy, 99(4):807-827, August 1991.
  • Innovation subsidies unambiguously encourage development
• Steven Shavell and Tanguy van Ypersele. Rewards versus Intellectual Property Rights. Journal of Law & Economics, 44(2):525-47, October 2001.
  • Idealized reward system superior to IP regime
• Michael Waterson. The Economics of Product Patents. American Economic Review, 80(4):860-69, September 1990.
  • patents will change firms' market entry decisions, though will not generally prevent entry entirely
• Richard Watt. Copyright and Economic Theory: Friends or Foes? Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, 2000.
  • presents simple economic theory through which copyright can be studies

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