The Market for Intellectual Property: the Case of Complementary Oligopoly

This paper applies a model of complementary oligopoly and anticommons pricing to the market for intellectual property rights. Our model evidences the interesting and often overlooked result that, in the market for complementary goods price coordination and monopolistic pricing do not necessarily represent inefficient equilibria, when compared to the alternative Nash equilibrium. Due to the peculiar cross-price effects in the supply of complementary goods, price coordination and monopolistic supply often constitute an improvement over the alternative equilibrium outcomes. To be precise, the welfare effects of competition and price coordination depend on the nature of the intellectual product concerned. This has obvious implications for the economic analysis of copyright collectivization and for antitrust regulation in this matter.