Beyond Price: Rights Trading in Strategic Factor Markets

Research on strategic factor markets has largely treated the terms of exchange as price. We argue that many strategic transactions instead divide value through contractual bundles in which payment terms and control rights are interdependent. In university technology licensing, we theorize Rights Trading: contingent payment, future improvement claims, and commercialization scope operate as linked components of the contractual bundle through which surplus is allocated. Using 858 hand coded university–industry licenses, we find that contracts relying more heavily on royalty and milestone provisions grant licensees stronger future improvement claims and broader commercialization scope. The results persist across controls and fixed effects and are directionally consistent with complementary instrumental-variable, event-study, and selection-bound analyses. We further show that this relationship is stronger when university technology transfer offices have greater contracting experience, suggesting that contracting capability shapes value appropriation in strategic factor markets. More broadly, the study shows that value appropriation in strategic factor markets depends not only on what organizations pay for strategic resources, but also on how contracts allocate control over their future development and commercialization.