Basic innovations are often fundamental to the development of applications that maybe developed by other innovators. In this setting, we investigate whether patent pools canrectify the lack of incentives for developers to invest in applications. Following Green andScotchmer (1995), we also...

Intellectual property rights are legal constraints that limit entry in industries where incumbentsare innovators. The set of legal constraints is the same for all industries, withoutconsidering that the externalities created by entry are not necessarily negative for the incumbentor that the...

Recent surveys report that firms claim they do not rely heavily on patents in order toappropriate a return on their innovation. Yet, firms do patent, as indicated by the largenumber of patents that are granted. This paper offers a possible resolution to this puzzle.It takes a simplified version...