At which stage in the production chain should patent licensing takes place? In this paper we show that under realistic circumstances a patent holder would be better off by licensing downstream. This occurs when the licensing revenue can depend on the downstream value of the product either...

It has been commonly argued that the decision of a large number of inventors to license complementary patents necessary for the development of a product leads to excessively large royalties. This well-known Cournot-complements or royalty-stacking effect would hurt efficiency and downstream...

This paper presents a model of cumulative innovation where firms are heterogeneous in their research ability. We study the optimal reward policy when the quality of the ideas and their subsequent development effort are private information. The optimal assignment of property rights must...