We consider patent licensing under a simple model of asymmetric information, where an outsider innovator of a cost-reducing innovation interacts with a monopolist, whose cost is private information. When the innovator is endowed with combinations of fixed fee and royalty, in any optimal menu, the low-cost monopolist is always offered a pure fixed fee contract, while for the contract offered to ...

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a shortlisted set. Items are differentiated by observable quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. The buyer’s problem is to select a subset of maximal quality. Money does not enter the buyer’s objective function, but only his constraints. Sellers quote prices strategically, inducing a knapsack game. We report the B...

We consider a regulator who does not know how many firms should be granted a license to enter a market as he has limited information on their setup costs. We propose two auction formats which implement the efficient market structure. One is called ”jumping English auction”, where the price for a license increases continuously most of the times, but jumps at pre-specified points. The other is ca...

In this paper, we develop a vertically differentiated duopoly model where a high-quality producer competes against a low-quality producer, a la Cournot competition. The high-quality firm has both a new technology and an obsolescent technology. After first deciding whether to license, the firm then chooses which of the two technologies to license. We show that, irrespective of the licensing cont...

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a shortlisted set. Items are differentiated by quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. Sellers quote prices strategically, inducing a knapsack game. The buyer’s problem is to select a subset of maximal quality. We propose a buying mechanism which can be viewed as a game theoretic extension of Dantzig’s greedy heuri...

This paper reconsiders experimental tests of the English clock auction. We point out why the standard procedure can only use a small subset of all bids, which gives rise to a selection bias. We propose an alternative yet equivalent format that makes all bids visible, and apply it to a “wallet auction” experiment. Finally, we test the theory against various alternative hypotheses, and compare th...

I study the welfare optimal allocation of a number of identical and indivisible objects to a set of heterogeneous risk-neutral agents under the hypothesis that money is not available. Agents have independent private values, which represent the maximum time that they are willing to wait in line to obtain a good. A priority list, which ranks agents according to their expected values, is optimal w...

We find that, across OECD countries, there is a strong link between the rate of self employment and the intensity of both productand labor-market regulations. The sensitivity of the self-employment rate to regulation appears greater in terms of statistical significance and magnitude than the sensitivity of unemployment. We then develop a model of rent creation and division featuring product and...

Marine clay soils are problematic in the construction industry when they subjected to loads. When these loaded, lose their structure. This leads soil being unable withstand loads of any magnitude without exhibiting significant, permanent deformations. In order stabilize marine soil, new methods for improvement were built upon biogrouting by incorporating physical, biological and chemical treatm...

Several recent technological standards were accompanied by patent pools—arrangements to license relevant intellectual property as a package. A key distinction made by regulators—between patents essential to a standard and patents with substitutes—has not been addressed in the theoretical literature. I show that pools of essential patents are always welfare increasing, while pools which include ...