The paper examines under what conditions vertically differentiated duopolists engage in first-degree price discrimination. Each firm decides on a pricing regime at a first stage and sets prices at a second stage. The paper shows that when unit cost is an increasing and convex function of...

In this paper, we revisit the issue of licensing ‘weak' patents under the shadow of litigation. Departing from the seminal paper by Farrell and Shapiro [2008], we consider innovations of any size and not only ‘small' innovations, and we allow the number of licensees to be less than the...

This article shows how European courts have managed tensions between antitrust and intellectual protection in three areas: (1) Parallel imports and market segmentation; (2) Refusals to supply essential inputs protected by patents and copyrights; (3) Forms of conduct by copyright collectives.

In this paper we examine the implications of uncertainty over patent validity on patentholders' licensing strategies. Two licensing mechanisms are examined: per-unit royalty and up-front fee.We provide conditions under which uncertain patents are licensed in order to avoid patent litigation. It...

Patents are probabilistic rights. We set up a multi-stage model in which choosing between patent and trade secrecy is affected by three parameters : the patent strength defined as the probability that the right is upheld by the court, the cost of imitating a patented innovation relative to the...

L'objet de cet article est d'analyser les relations entre la science et la technologie selon un double prisme. Le premier, de nature historique, cherche à comprendre comment s'est opéré le passage des savoir-faire fondés sur des connaissances prescriptives (techniques) à des savoir-faire...

La teoría económica, al considerar que las patentes son instrumentos de política pública para fomentar la innovación y la difusión de la tecnología, conduce principalmente a tres conclusiones. En primer lugar, las patentes no tienen por qué ser siempre el medio de protección más eficaz...

Dans la phase des vagues d'innovations contemporaines, phase qu'on assimile à la troisième révolution industrielle ou encore à l'ère du numérique, les relations entre innovations, gains de productivité et emplois font l'objet de vives controverses, notamment aux Etats-Unis, pays phare en...

Book's Review:Louis Kaplow, Competition Policy and Price Fixing, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2013

In this paper the authors argue that the contemporary tensions between patents and competition no longer reside in the traditional trade-off between the exclusionary right given to an inventor to encourage innovation, and the welfare loss induced by the market power associated to this right....