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Efficient Patent Pools

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Author Info
Josh Lerner
Jean Tirole

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Abstract

The paper builds a tractable model of a patent pool, an agreement among patent owners to license a set of their patents to one another or to third parties. It first provides a necessary and suñcient condition for a patent pool to enhance welfare. It shows that requiring pool members to be able to independently license patents matters if and only if the pool is otherwise welfare reducing, a property that allows the antitrust authorities to use this requirement to screen out unattractive pools. The paper then undertakes a number of extensions. It evaluates the external test' according to which patents with substitutes should not be included in a pool; analyzes the welfare implications of the reduction in the members' incentives to invent around or challenge the validity of each other's patents; looks at the rationale for the (common) provision of automatic assignment of future related patents to the pool; and, last, studies the intellectual property owners' incentives to form a pool or to cross-license when they themselves are users of the patents in the pool.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 9175.

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Date of creation: Sep 2002
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:9175

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
K11 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law - - - Property Law
L41 - Industrial Organization - - Antitrust Issues and Policies - - - Monopolization; Horizontal Anticompetitive Practices

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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.:
  1. Lerner, Josh & Strojwas, Marcin & Tirole, Jean, 2005. "The Design of Patent Pools: The Determinants of Licensing Rules," IDEI Working Papers 187, Institut d'Économie Industrielle (IDEI), Toulouse. [Downloadable!]
  2. Carl Shapiro, 2001. "Navigating the Patent Thicket: Cross Licenses, Patent Pools, and Standard Setting," NBER Chapters, in: Innovation Policy and the Economy, Volume 1, pages 119-150 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  3. Rasmusen, Eric, 1988. "Entry for Buyout," Journal of Industrial Economics, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 36(3), pages 281-99, March. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  4. Hausman, Jerry A & Leonard, Gregory K & Tirole, Jean, 2003. " On Nonexclusive Membership in Competing Joint Ventures," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 34(1), pages 43-62, Spring.
    Other versions:
  5. Brueckner, Jan K & Whalen, W Tom, 2000. "The Price Effects of International Airline Alliances," Journal of Law & Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 43(2), pages 503-45, October.
  6. Vincenzo Denicolò, 2002. "Sequential innovation and the patent-antitrust conflict," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 54(4), pages 649-668, October.
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This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.
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This page was last updated on 2009-11-25.

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