This article considers the care choice of a potentially bankrupt injurer when care is pecuniary and the legal system is characterized by strict liability. I show, contrary to previous results, that such an injurer may take too little or too much care, and that neither injurer care nor victim...

Licensing contracts for newly patented innovations are observed to vary along several dimensions, including the form and size of the payment to the inventor (fixed fee versus some output-based royalty), the degree of exclusivity, and the division of rents. In this article, we show that the form...

Adopting antitakeover measures can enable the shareholders of a target firm to increase their share of any synergy gains expected to result from combining their firm with a bidder. Adopting such measures enhances the bargaining power of the target's manager, who will be a tougher bargainer than...

I explore the trade-off between a patent's length (that is, its lifetime) and its width (that is, its scope of coverage). A wider patent generally reduces the distortion of consumers' choices between the patented brand of the product and unpatented, lower-priced varieties sold by competitors but...

This article presents a theoretical model of the rivalry between two firms in a market that undergoes a life cycle of growth and eventual decline. Firms in this market have the option of exit and reentry. In the equilibrium for the growth phase, high entry costs can act like high exit costs,...

The use of patents in economic research has been seriously hindered by the fact that patents vary enormously in their importance or value, and hence, simple patent counts cannot be informative about innovative output. The purpose of this article is to put forward patent counts weighted by...

Data on 30 chemical products are used to examine the sequence of divestment in declining industries. Small firms and plants might be expected to close first, given lack of scale economies. However, recent theories suggest that large producers may have greater incentives to exit or cut capacity....

We study the effects of changes in the ownership or productive assets in a concentrated industry. Using a Cournot model, we analyze (1) investment by an oligopolist, (2) the sale of capital goods by one oligopolist to another, and (3) stock market purchases, whereby one firm acquires a partial...

Introduction

Several empirical regularities concerning firm growth rates and industry firm-size distributions have been developed by studying primarily mature industries. The primary purpose of this article is to bring together and extend empirical regularities on the evolution of new industries and to use...