We typically assume that intellectual property makes a substantial difference in regulating access to intellectual goods and thereby provides incentives for the production of intellectual goods. But the existence of alternative instruments by which to appropriate innovation returns suggests that...

It is commonly asserted that innovation markets suffer from excessive intellectual property protections, which in turn stifle output. But empirical inquiries can neither confirm nor deny this assertion. Under the "agnostic" assumption that we cannot assess directly whether intellectual-property...

Intellectual property licenses are commonly portrayed as a “tax” that limits access to technology assets, thereby stunting innovation by intermediate users and inflating prices for end-users. This presumptively skeptical view motivated postwar antitrust’s proliferation of per se rules...

Digital markets offer abundant free content but exhibit extreme concentration among content aggregation intermediaries. These characteristics are linked. In commoditized weak-IP markets, firms earn revenues by bundling free content for users with positively priced advertising services for firms....

Legal scholars have tended to approach the licensing of intellectual property rights with skepticism, calling for legal intervention to protect the public domain against purported encroachment by IP licensors. Recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court are consistent with this view. This...

Intellectual property rests on a simple incentive rationale: without imitation barriers, innovators rationally decline to invest. But this blanket proposition is incompatible with markets where innovation proceeds without substantial recourse to intellectual property and imitation is widespread....

It is commonly observed that certification intermediaries mitigate informational asymmetries by “lending” reputational capital to support transacting parties' quality commitments. However, this proposition is challenged by cases in which well-established intermediaries have failed to detect...

Copyright is typically justified by the rationale that profits induce authors and other artists to invest resources in cultural production. This rationale is vulnerable to the objection that some artists have intrinsic incentives to invest in cultural production and do not require significant...

Private certification mechanisms are a key component of the regulatory infrastructure in the financial sector and other commercial settings. It is generally assumed that certification intermediaries have profit-based incentives to deliver accurate information to the certified market. But this...

It is widely assumed that platform technology markets are inherently prone to converge on monopoly outcomes in which a single firm or a handful of firms enjoy market power due to a combination of network effects and switching costs. This assumption supports both proposed and enacted regulatory...