Most patent pools are formed in the shadow of patent litigation as an attempt to settle disputes in regard to conflicting infringement claims and the validity of patents. To reflect this reality, I develop a simple framework to analyze the incentives to form a patent pool or engage in...

This paper gives an account of events, and explains some systematic reasons of the UMTS auction flop in Switzerland. Apart from general market developments, which could not have been anticipated, we argue that auction design which was introduced in England and adopted in Switzerland and...

In this paper the author reviews the Dutch UMTS-auction that took place in the summer of 2000 and which, in contrast to the UK and German auctions, was generally considered to be a major flop. He analyses the policy process leading to the auctions as well as the bidding behaviour in the auction,...

We briefly survey several insights about value and revenue maximization in multi-object auctions and apply them to the German (and Austrian) UMTS auction. In particular, we discuss in detail the exposure problem that caused firms in Germany to pay almost Euro 20 billion for nothing.

The third generation UMTS auction in Gremany raised an enormous amount of revenue, and the same time achieved a more competitive market structure than other UMTS auctions in Europe. The present paper explains the design of that auction, and presents a game theoretic explanation of observed...

For several years, an increasing number of firms have been investing in Open Source Software (OSS). While improvements in such a non-excludable public good cannot be appropriated, companies can benefit indirectly in a complementary proprietary segment. We study this incentive for investment in...