Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Use Of Economics Experiments To Understand Patent Licensing, Patent Challenging And Patent Litigation Behavior, Rita Abdelnour

Department of Agricultural Economics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The existing patent literature suggests that the patent breadth is an important factor in determining the innovator’s patent licensing and litigation behavior and that licensing a patent to a competitor is driven by profit. The present study develops two economics experiment to investigate these assumptions.

First, a choice experiment is developed to investigate the patentee’s objective when licensing her innovation, by examining whether, when the decision to license is made, the patentee maximizes profits or her strategy is to maintain a dominant market position by controlling the largest market share. The results show that the assumptions of profit maximization and …