Collective management of intellectual property rights

This paper proposes a common analysis for a large set of multilateral agreements that are used to collectively manage intellectual property in industries as different as biotechnologies or information technologies. It discusses how these agreements, based on existing intellectual property institutions, can encourage innovation either by facilitating technology transfers or by improving the organization of collective innovation processes. In the first part we explain how the collective management of intellectual property rights can be used to facilitate arm’s length technology transfers. Its objective is then to facilitate the access to information about variety, to reduce negotiation costs and to optimize the management of prices. In the second part we explain how the collective management of intellectual property rights can be used to improve the innovation production processes by proposing a wide set of organizational structures ranging from centralized organizations that rely heavily on planning, to decentralized organizations that use incentives to motivate participants. As a conclusion, we highlight new challenges for competition policy generated by those tools.