This paper tests a number of hypotheses on the use and effectiveness of patents and trade secrets designed to protect innovation. While previous studies have often considered patents and trade secrets as substitutes for one another, we investigate the complementary role of the two protection...

Most marketing practitioners and scholars agree that marketing assets such as brand equity significantly contribute to a firm's financial performance. In this paper, we model brand equity as an unobservable stock that results from up to thirty years of past brand-related investment flows. Using...

This article analyzes how the perceived effectiveness of intellectual property protection and competitive pressure affect firms' innovation strategy choices, concretely, whether to abstain from innovation, to introduce products that are known in the market but new to the firm (imitation) or to...

We examine the relationship between fragmented intellectual property (IP) rights and the innovative performance of firms, taking into consideration the role played by in-licensing of IP. We find that firms facing more fragmented IP landscapes have a higher probability of in-licensing. For firms...

Innovators seek to protect their intellectual assets by patenting them, at the same time trying to avoid any disclosure of critical knowledge. Given that a patent specification has to include a clear description of the patented matter so that anybody "skilled in the art" is enabled to reproduce...

Classical patent literature assumes that patents grant well-defined legal rights to exclude others from practicing an invention. In this scenario, start-up companies benefit from the exclusive right to commercialize patent-protected inventions and the certification effect of patents which...

Intangible knowledge capital (IKC) - technology produced by workers but not embodied in them - can offset the "middle income trap" as China exhausts the benefits of international technology transfer. IKC is productivity-enhancing among Chinese enterprises - more so in domestically owned than in...

Transaction costs and contracting problems associated with proliferation of patents may have a negative impact on innovation. We present novel data on the frequency with which innovative German firms encounter problems with access to intellectual property (IP) for innovation. While only a small...

Digital designs - that is, designs for display on electronic screens - have recently burst onto the intellectual property (IP) stage. While in the U.S. a smattering of legal studies have recently addressed the question of digital design as a copyright-, trademark- and patent-eligible subject...

If redistribution is distortionary, and if the income of skilled workers is due to knowledgeintensive activities and depends positively on intellectual property, a social planner which cares about income distribution may in principle want to use a reduction in Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs)...