The paper builds a tractable model of a patent pool, an agreement among patent owners to license a set of their patents to one another or to third parties. It first provides a necessary and sufficient condition for a patent pool to enhance welfare. It shows that requiring pool members to be able...

The intertemporal CAPM predicts that an asset's price is equal to the expectation of the product of the asset's payoff and a representative consumer's intertemporal marginal rate of substitution. This paper develops an alternative approach to assest pricing based on corporations' desire to hoard...

Unemployment insurance and employment protection are typically discussed and studied in isolation. In this paper, we argue that they are tightly linked, and we focus on their joint optimal design.We start our analysis with a simple benchmark, with risk averse workers, risk neutral firms, and...

This paper empirically explores the procedures employed by standard-setting organizations. Consistent with Lerner-Tirole (2004), we find (a) a negative relationship between the extent to which an SSO is oriented to technology sponsors and the concession level required of sponsors and (b) a...

Owners of intellectual property or mere sponsors of an idea (e.g., authors, security issuers, sponsors of standards) often need to persuade potential buyers or adopters of the worth of their property or idea. To this purpose, they often resort to more or less independent certifiers. This paper...

This paper reviews our understanding of the growing open source movement. We highlight how many aspects of open source software appear initially puzzling to an economist. As we have acknowledged, our ability to answer confidently many of the issues raised here questions is likely to increase as...

On numerous occasions, rival firms seek to market goods together, particularly in high-technology industries. This paper empirically examines one such institution: the patent pool. The analysis highlights five findings consistent with the theoretical predictions: (a) pools involving substitute...