Industrial Organization Commons^™

Antisocial Innovation, Christopher Buccafusco, Samuel N. Weinstein

Georgia Law Review

Innovation is a form of civic religion in the United States. In the popular imagination, innovators are heroic figures. Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, and (for a while) Elizabeth Holmes were lauded for their vision and drive and seen to embody the American spirit of invention and improvement. For their part, politicians rarely miss a chance to trumpet their vision for boosting innovative activity. Popular and political culture alike treat innovation as an unalloyed good. And the law is deeply committed to fostering innovation, spending billions of dollars a year to make sure society has enough of it. But this sunny …

Board Of Director Composition: An Examination Of How Director Age And Board Innovation Committees Impact Corporate Social And Financial Performance, Sami Ghaddar

2021

This dissertation explores how director age affects a firm’s social domain, and how board-level oversight of firms’ innovation activities affects financial performance. Specifically, the dissertation points to board configurations that can potentially improve social and financial performance. The first chapter reviews the literature by examining two research streams linking board composition to corporate social performance (CSP) and innovation. The chapter presents the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of these two streams. It details the descriptive and thematic findings and offers an understanding of the different contexts in which board composition relates to both CSP and innovation. This chapter also discusses inconsistencies …

Is The Digital Economy Too Concentrated?, Jonathan Klick

All Faculty Scholarship

Concentration in the digital economy in the United States has sparked loud criticism and spurred calls for wide-ranging reforms. These reforms include everything from increased enforcement of existing antitrust laws, such as challenging more mergers and breaking up firms, to an abandonment of the consumer welfare standard. Critics cite corruption and more systemic public choice problems, while others invoke the populist origins of antitrust to slay the digital Goliaths. On the other side, there is skepticism regarding these arguments. This chapter continues much of that skepticism.

Intellectual Property And The Economics Of Product Differentiation, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

The literature applying the economics of product differentiation to intellectual property has been called the most important development in the economic analysis of IP in years. Relaxing the assumption that products are homogeneous yields new insights by explaining persistent features of IP markets that the traditional approaches cannot, challenging the extent to which IP allows rightsholders to earn monopoly profits, allowing for sources of welfare outside of price-quantity space, which in turn opens up new dimensions along which intellectual property can compete. It also allows for equilibria with different welfare characteristics, making the tendency towards systematic underproduction more contingent and …

Antitrust And The Design Of Production, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Both economics and antitrust policy have traditionally distinguished “production” from “distribution.” The former is concerned with how products are designed and built, the latter with how they are placed into the hands of consumers. Nothing in the language of the antitrust laws suggests much concern with production as such. Although courts do not view it that way, even per se unlawful naked price fixing among rivals is a restraint on distribution rather than production. Naked price fixing assumes a product that has already been designed and built, and the important cartel decision is what should be each firm’s output, or …

Activating Actavis, Aaron Edlin, C. Scott Hemphill, Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Carl Shapiro

Aaron Edlin

In Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis, Inc., the Supreme Court provided fundamental guidance about how courts should handle antitrust challenges to reverse payment patent settlements. The Court came down strongly in favor of an antitrust solution to the problem, concluding that “an antitrust action is likely to prove more feasible administratively than the Eleventh Circuit believed.” At the same time, Justice Breyer’s majority opinion acknowledged that the Court did not answer every relevant question. The opinion closed by “leav[ing] to the lower courts the structuring of the present rule-of-reason antitrust litigation.”This article is an effort to help courts and counsel …

Actavis And Error Costs: A Reply To Critics, Aaron S. Edlin, C. Scott Hemphill, Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Carl Shapiro

Aaron Edlin

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis, Inc. provided fundamental guidance about how courts should handle antitrust challenges to reverse payment patent settlements. In our previous article, Activating Actavis, we identified and operationalized the essential features of the Court’s analysis. Our analysis has been challenged by four economists, who argue that our approach might condemn procompetitive settlements.As we explain in this reply, such settlements are feasible, however, only under special circumstances. Moreover, even where feasible, the parties would not actually choose such a settlement in equilibrium. These considerations, and others discussed in the reply, serve to confirm …

Essays On Competition In The Pharmaceutical Industry, Jiangyun Wan

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Chapter 1: Patents and Entry Competition in the Pharmaceutical Industry: The Role of Marketing Exclusivity

Effective patent length for innovation drugs is severely curtailed because of extensive efficacy and safety tests required for FDA approval, raising concern over adequacy of incentives for new drug development. The Hatch-Waxman Act extends patent length for new drugs by five years, but also promotes generic entry by simplifying approval procedures and granting 180-day marketing exclusivity to a first generic entrant before the patent expires. In this paper we present a dynamic model to examine the effect of marketing exclusivity. We find that marketing exclusivity …

Licensing And Innovation With Imperfect Contract Enforcement, Richard J. Gilbert, Eirik Gaard Kristiansen

Richard J Gilbert

Licensing promotes technology transfer and innovation, but enforcement of licensing contracts is often imperfect. We explore the implications of weak enforcement of contractual commitments on the licensing conduct of firms and market performance. An upstream firm develops a technology that it can license to downstream firms using a fixed fee and a per-unit royalty. Strictly positive per-unit royalties maximize the licensor's profit if competition among licensees limits joint profits. Although imperfect contract enforcement lowers the profits of the upstream firm, weak enforcement lowers prices, increase downstream innovation, and in some circumstances can increase total economic welfare.

The Virtuous Circle Of Innovation In Italian Firms, Francesco Bogliacino, Matteo Lucchese, Leopoldo Nascia, Mario Pianta

Mario Pianta

The “virtuous circle” between innovative inputs, outputs and economic performance is investigated in this article with a three equation model highlighting feedback loops and simultaneous relations. An empirical test is carried out considering innovative expenditure, innovative turnover and economic results in a sample of Italian manufacturing firms which are ‘serial innovators’. We use data for the period 2000-2008 from a rich panel of Italian firms over 50 employees drawn from ISTAT, the National Institute of Statistics, including data from three waves of Community Innovation Surveys. The model we use extends the one developed at the industry level by Bogliacino and …

Teece's Competing Through Innovation, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay reviews David J. Teece's book, Competing Through Innovation: Technological Strategies and Antitrust Policies (2013).

Actavis And Error Costs: A Reply To Critics, Aaron S. Edlin, C. Scott Hemphill, Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Carl Shapiro

All Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis, Inc. provided fundamental guidance about how courts should handle antitrust challenges to reverse payment patent settlements. In our previous article, Activating Actavis, we identified and operationalized the essential features of the Court’s analysis. Our analysis has been challenged by four economists, who argue that our approach might condemn procompetitive settlements.

As we explain in this reply, such settlements are feasible, however, only under special circumstances. Moreover, even where feasible, the parties would not actually choose such a settlement in equilibrium. These considerations, and others discussed in the reply, serve to …

The Evolution Of Innovation And The Evolution Of Regulation: Emerging Tensions And Emerging Opportunities In Communications, John W. Mayo

John W Mayo

Changes to an industry’s core technologies inevitably create tension for regulatory institutions. This is true for any sector experiencing persistent disruptive innovation, and that has been the defining feature of the communications industry for the last two decades or longer. In very short order, a century of switched voice communication networks have been supplanted by new, packet-based voice, video and data networks, rendering both the legal and regulatory framework hammered out for the switched-voice era increasingly strained. This incongruity has created tangible regulatory asymmetries. Wireline telephony provided by a “telco” is regulated by the Federal Communications Commission under Title II …

Essay On Firm Inventory And Innovation Behavior, Ye Gu

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation studies firm’s decisions on inventory investment and innovation activities. The first chapter examines firm inventory behavior. It resolves and simulates the production smoothing/buffer stock model using different sets of parameters. It shows that the relationship between a sales shock and inventory investment could be ambiguous which is different from previous predictions. The production smoothing/buffer stock model and the (S, s) model of inventory are tested using a rich Chinese firm-level dataset covering 769 manufacturing firms from 1980 to 1989, and I find that sales are positively correlated with inventory for raw materials, but negatively correlated with …

Essays On Innovation And Consumer Credit, David E. Fieldhouse

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In the first chapter, I show that the economy’s production structure plays an important role in determining innovation. In particular, using patent data I document a set of empirical facts that are initially puzzling, but can be explained by recognizing that innovation decisions are related between sectors. A model is developed to explain the empirical findings, but it also has an important finding for the current debate on U.S. patent policy. I use the model to demonstrate that a perceived long-run decline could be explained by increased innovative opportunities in certain industries and the responses of inventors in other sectors …

Export, R&D And New Products. A Model And A Test On European Industries, Dario Guarascio, Mario Pianta, Francesco Bogliacino

Mario Pianta

In this article we extend the model developed by Bogliacino and Pianta (2013a, 2013b) on the link between R&D, innovation and economic performance, considering the impact of innovation of export success. We develop a simultaneous three equation model in order to investigate the existence of a ‘virtuous circle’ between industries’ R&D, share of product innovators and export market shares. We investigate empirically – at the industry level – three key relationships affecting the dynamics of innovation and export performance: first, the capacity of firms to translate their R&D efforts in new products; second, the role of innovation as a determinant …

Competition For Innovation, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Both antitrust and IP law are limited and imperfect instruments for regulating innovation. The problems include high information costs and lack of sufficient knowledge, special interest capture, and the jury trial system, to name a few. More fundamentally, antitrust law and intellectual property law have looked at markets in very different ways. Further, over the last three decades antitrust law has undergone a reformation process that has made it extremely self conscious about its goals. While the need for such reform is at least as apparent in patent and copyright law, very little true reform has actually occurred.

Antitrust has …

Activating Actavis, Aaron Edlin, C. Scott Hemphill, Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Carl Shapiro

All Faculty Scholarship

In Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis, Inc., the Supreme Court provided fundamental guidance about how courts should handle antitrust challenges to reverse payment patent settlements. The Court came down strongly in favor of an antitrust solution to the problem, concluding that “an antitrust action is likely to prove more feasible administratively than the Eleventh Circuit believed.” At the same time, Justice Breyer’s majority opinion acknowledged that the Court did not answer every relevant question. The opinion closed by “leav[ing] to the lower courts the structuring of the present rule-of-reason antitrust litigation.”

This article is an effort to help courts and …

Institutional Advantage In Competition And Innovation Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

In the United States responsibility for innovation policy and competition policy are assigned to different agencies with different authority. The principal institutional enforcers of patent policy are the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the International Trade Commission (ITC), and the federal district courts as overseen by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and ultimately the Supreme Court. While competition policy is not an explicit part of patent policy, competition issues arise frequently, even when they are not seen as such.

Since early in the twentieth century antitrust courts have had to confront practices that …

Competition And Innovation In Copyright And The Dmca, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This book of CASES AND MATERIALS ON INNOVATION AND COMPETITION POLICY is intended for educational use. The book is free for all to use subject to an open source license agreement. It differs from IP/antitrust casebooks in that it considers numerous sources of competition policy in addition to antitrust, including those that emanate from the intellectual property laws themselves, and also related issues such as the relationship between market structure and innovation, the competitive consequences of regulatory rules governing technology competition such as net neutrality and interconnection, misuse, the first sale doctrine, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Chapters …

Markets In Ip And Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of market definition in antitrust law is to identify a grouping of sales such that a single firm who controlled them could maintain prices for a significant time at above the competitive level. The conceptions and procedures that go into “market definition” in antitrust can be quite different from those that go into market definition in IP law. When the issue of market definition appears in IP cases, it is mainly as a query about the range over which rivalry occurs. This rivalry may or may not have much to do with a firm’s ability to charge a …

Measurement Of The Agglomeration And The Geographic Concentration Of The Innovation Across Mexican States, Vicente German-Soto, Luis Gutiérrez Flores

Vicente German-Soto

Introduction To Creation Without Restraint: Promoting Liberty And Rivalry In Innovation, Christina Bohannan, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This document contains the table of contents, introduction, and a brief description of Christina Bohannan & Herbert Hovenkamp, Creation without Restraint: Promoting Liberty and Rivalry in Innovation (Oxford 2011).

Promoting rivalry in innovation requires a fusion of legal policies drawn from patent, copyright, and antitrust law, as well as economics and other disciplines. Creation Without Restraint looks first at the relationship between markets and innovation, noting that innovation occurs most in moderately competitive markets and that small actors are more likely to be truly creative innovators. Then we examine the problem of connected and complementary relationships, a dominant feature of …

Innovazione Tecnologica, Organizzazione E Produttività Nella Manifattura Italiana: Evidenze Recenti Per L’Area Nec, Riccardo Cappelli, Nicola Matteucci

Nicola Matteucci

Recenti statistiche evidenziano che il problema della bassa crescita ed efficienza dell’Italia risiede principalmente nella dinamica della produttività totale dei fattori (total factor productivity, o TFP), in netto peggioramento proprio nel settore manifatturiero. Inoltre, tra le spiegazioni del supposto declino economico ed industriale dell’Italia, quelle che si concentrano sulle variabili tecnologico-organizzative sembrano tornare in primo piano, anche alla luce del dibattito sulla “strategia di Lisbona”. Questi temi sono ricollegabili al dibattito sull’evoluzione strutturale e organizzativa del modello NEC e sulle sue capacità di risposta alle sfide dell’economia globale. Il presente lavoro studia l’evoluzione della relazione tra R&S, organizzazione e produttività …