When firms have different R&D productivities, it may be welfare increasing to differentiate patent lives across inventions. The reason is that the uniform patent life provides excessive incentives to do R&D to the low productivity firms and insufficient incentives to high productivity firms. Such a differentiated scheme is implementable through renewal fees, which endogenously determine an optimal pattern of patent life-spans and show how it depends on key features of the economic environment, such as the degree of heterogeneity in R&D productivity across firms, the ability of patentees to appropriate the potentital rents generated by R&D and the learning process about the value of innovation. The potential welfare gains associated with optimal renewal schemes are illustrated through simulation analysis.
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Paper provided by Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE in its series STICERD - Economics of Industry Papers with number
13.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Roger B. Myerson, 1978.
"Optimal Auction Design,"
Discussion Papers
362, Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science.
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