IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/red/sed008/177.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Economics of Patent Pools When Some (But Not All) Patents Are Essential

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel Quint

    (University of Wisconsin - Madison)

Abstract

Patent pools are agreements by multiple patent owners to license some set of patents to third parties as a package; in recent years, several have formed in conjunction with emerging technological standards. A key distinction made by regulators – between patents which are essential to a standard and patents for which suitable substitutes exist – has not been addressed in the theoretical literature. I present a model of imperfect competition where “products” are overlapping bundles of components from different suppliers; essential components are those which are necessary inputs for all of the products. Applying the model to patent pools, I show that pools of essential patents are Pareto-improving whenever they occur, while pools including nonessential patents can be welfare-negative. Contrary to earlier results, the latter can hold even when pools are limited to patents which are pairwise complements, and even with pools which are stable under compulsory individual licensing.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel Quint, 2008. "Economics of Patent Pools When Some (But Not All) Patents Are Essential," 2008 Meeting Papers 177, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    • Handle: RePEc:red:sed008:177
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:red:sed008:177. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christian Zimmermann (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sedddea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.