In the home-care services industry, caregivers drive to visit patients scattered in a district and deliver various care services at the patient's home. We use a unique data set, with a standard panel structure, recording the hours of service and the exact number of miles traveled by each...

The main topic of this paper is about the overall functionnning of the french futures bonds market. Three mains questions are asked: (1) Is the futures market inefficient? (2) Is there any free lunch between the future market and the spot market? (3) Does one of these markets play a leader role?...

To explain the existence of stop-loss rules in financial institutions, we develop a principal/agent model, where an investment firm (the principal) has to rely on the expertise of a trader (the agent) to invest in a risky asset (a future contract, say). When the trader faces a limited liability...

This paper investigates the choice of an intellectual protection regime for a process innovation. We set up a multi-stage model in which choosing between patent and trade secrecy is affected by three parameters : the patent strength defined as the probability that the right is upheld by the...

This paper investigates the choice of an intellectual protection regime for a process innovation. We set up a multi-stage model in which choosing between patent and trade secrecy is affected by three parameters : the patent strength defined as the probability that the right is upheld by the...

This article proposes an analysis of the science-technology interactions. The first part is historical and focuses on the transformations that resulted from the passage of a prescriptive knowledge (techniques) to a scientifically based knowledge (technology). The contemporaneous relations...

La teoría económica, al considerar que las patentes son instrumentos de política pública para fomentar la innovación y la difusión de la tecnología, conduce principalmente a tres conclusiones. En primer lugar, las patentes no tienen por qué ser siempre el medio de protección más eficaz...

In this paper we examine the implications of uncertainty over patent validity on patentholders' licensing strategies. Two licensing mechanisms are examined: per-unit royalty and up-front fee.We provide conditions under which uncertain patents are licensed in order to avoid patent litigation. It...

In this paper, we revisit the issue of licensing ‘weak' patents under the shadow of litigation. Departing from the seminal paper by Farrell and Shapiro [2008], we consider innovations of any size and not only ‘small' innovations, and we allow the number of licensees to be less than the...

Cet article propose une réflexion générale sur le système des brevets. Trois questions sont d'abord examinées : 1. Le brevet favorise-t-il l'innovation ? 2. La propriété intellectuelle est-elle comparable aux autres formes de propriété ? 3. La protection par le brevet est-elle...