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Efficient Patent Pools

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  • Josh Lerner
  • Jean Tirole

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Josh Lerner & Jean Tirole, 2002. "Efficient Patent Pools," NBER Working Papers 9175, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:9175
    Note: CF PR
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
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    6. 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.
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    More about this item

    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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