In a patent thicket licensing provides a mechanism to either avoid or resolve hold up. We study the choice between ex ante licensing to avoid hold up and ex post licensing to resolve it. Firms’ choice of licensing contract is studied in the context of a patent portfolio race. We show that high expected blocking leads to ex ante licensing while ex post licensing arises if expected blocking is lo...

Low serum potassium concentration is a frequently encountered abnormality, seldom accompanied by life-threatening symptoms. We present a 55-year-old women with a severe, symptomatic hypokalaemia. The pathogenesis and clinical manifestations are discussed.

We study how different rules for allocating litigation costs impact on royalty negotiation when a non-practicing patent holder asserts its patent against a product developer. A theoretical framework is proposed which distinguishes between three legal cost allocation systems: the American system, where each party bears its own costs, the British system, where the loser incurs all costs, and the ...

We consider a setting in which the buyer’s ability to hold up a seller’s investment is so severe that there is no investment in equilibrium of the static game typically analyzed. We show that there exists an equilibrium of a related dynamic game generating positive investment. The seller makes a sequence of gradually smaller investments, each repaid by the buyer under the threat of losing furth...

In the contract-theoretic literature, there is a vital debate about whether contracts can mitigate the hold-up problem, in particular when renegotiation cannot be prevented. Ultimately, the question has to be answered empirically. As a first step, we have conducted a laboratory experiment with 1084 participants. We consider investments that directly benefit the non-investing party. While accord...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the evolution of bargaining norms in a simple team production problem with two sided relationship specific investments and competition. The puzzle we wish to address is why efficient bargaining norms do not evolve even though there exist efficient sequential equilibria? Conditions under which stochastically stable bargaining conventions exist are characte...

We investigate whether or not ex post destruction can solve the hold-up problem. After clarifying the difference between ex post destruction and nontrade when negotiation breaks down, we show that the option of ex post destruction is not sufficient to enhance ex ante efficiency. In particular, only if the information about the spitefulness of the supplier is coarse enough, will the option of ex...