Veranstaltungen

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313

The goal of this paper is to analyze whether the policy changes that have occurred in the European SEP licensing regulation affect the way agents negotiate SEP licenses with each other. In fact, the European SEP licensing regulation landscape has gone through three major policy changes since 2009: the Orange book standard (only Germany), the Samsung/Motorola decisions (EU-wide) and the Huawei v. ZTE judgement (EU-wide). Even though these reforms sought the same objective – namely sustaining innovation, healthy competition and protecting consumers from monopoly power – their means are, to some extent, quite divergent. Whilst the first policy change established rather strict conditions on the patent implementers, the second one reversed the situation completely, providing a safe harbour to patent users. In an attempt to clarify the issues raised by such a drastic reversal, the third policy change attempts to reach a balance between the previous two regulations, in order to provide a fair environment to the contracting parties.

We apply a simple Nash bargaining environment to SEP license negotiations in order to study how the changing institutions affect the outcome of such negotiations. By parameterizing policy changes, we are able to see how these alter the disagreement points of the negotiation game and, potentially, define the feasible bargaining range of successful negotiations.

Ansprechpartner: Dr. Fabian Gaessler

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313

In this paper, we consider how the timing of a donation decision relative to the production of disposable income affects charitable giving. In a real-effort laboratory experiment with a subsistence income constraint, we study the willingness to donate, the amounts donated as well as the change in labor supply of donors triggered by giving. We find that more people donate if the decision to donate is made before production as a binding pledge. We elaborate on the mechanism that channels the increase in performance. Our results suggest that a commitment to giving is a viable strategy for raising charitable funds. (joint with Andreas Nicklisch and Kai-Uwe Schnapp)

Cheryl Foong is a Lecturer at Curtin Law School in Western Australia, where she teaches Intellectual Property law and Competition law. Cheryl publishes in the area of digital copyright, open access and internet law, and regularly speaks at national and international IP conferences. Cheryl has a Master of Laws from Columbia Law School in New York, and previously interned at the United States Copyright Office (Office of Policy and International Affairs) in Washington, DC. She is a Bachelor of Laws with First Class Honours graduate from Queensland University of Technology in Australia, and recently completed her PhD at the Australian Catholic University.

Her presentation analyses the making available right as introduced by the WIPO Internet Treaties and evaluates current judicial approaches to the right in Australia, the US and the EU. It discusses the underlying justifications driving the disparate decisions on the right, and reveals the pitfalls of existing approaches. Distilling lessons from current approaches, this presentation proposes principles for the interpretation of the making available right. These principles are aimed at aligning the development of the making available right with the vast communications potential afforded by the Internet.

Moderation: Valentina Moscon

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313

The recent upsurge of patent litigation cases initiated by patent assertion entities (PAEs) in the US has led to an intense debate about their effect on innovation dynamics and on the IP system functioning. We contribute to this debate by providing original evidence based on the patenting activity of PAEs in Europe, a region where the patent assertion landscape is growing rapidly and the imminent introduction of the Unified Patent Court and the Unitary Patent will upset the current schemes. Relying on European Patent Office data on patent transfers and patent citations in the high-tech sector, our results show that PAEs acquire patents with high average technological quality. They may thus increase liquidity in the patent market, enhancing efficiency in the capital market for inventions. However, after a transfer occurs, patents transferred to PAEs receive significantly fewer citations than never transferred patents. Interestingly, when we focus directly on transferred patents, we find that there is not significant difference in the after-transfer pattern of citations between patents transferred to PAEs and patents transferred to other entities. On the one hand, the overall evidence suggests that PAEs do not operate as patent intermediaries. On the other, however, also transfers to producing companies seem not to increase the efficiency of the market for technology, opening relevant questions about its entire functioning. These results are robust to different measures of citations considered and to different econometric techniques applied. (joint with Gianluca Orsatti)

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313

Advances in science and innovation are traditionally viewed as starting from a question or problem or challenge. We have a problem to solve, a question to answer, and we seek ways to address these. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that some of the most creative and revolutionary solutions and innovations arise by a different process, where solutions did not come by seeking to address a problem. For example, Velcro was invented by de Mestral following an experience with a plant burr that stuck to his clothing. Seeing the mechanism by which the burr clung to fabric suggested a new way to design fasteners. Both the need and the solution were novel to him at the time of his observation and insight. Recent work by von Hippel and von Krogh (2016) has argued that such discoveries may arise from a heretofore unstudied form of solution-finding. They proposed that such discoveries arise without the need for a priori problem-formulation. Instead, a chance observation or encounter prompts an insight that provides a solution which by its recognition identifies the need it satisfies simultaneously. They termed this kind of situation “a need-solution pair.” It will be argued that need-solution pair innovation may be a highly prevalent and creative form of solution-finding that emerges from the natural capacity of perceivers to apprehend (consciously or unconsciously) the functions of objects as part of the natural process of object recognition and understanding. Implications of this unstudied process for models of general solution-finding will be discussed and direction for further research and improved approaches to innovation be offered.

Ansprechpartnerin: Fabian Gaessler

Moderation: Francisco Beneke

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, Raum 313

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313

We provide a practitioner's view on the economics of licensing standard-essential patents and related issues of standard development. Based on a presentation of the paper "Over-Declaration of Standard Essential Patents and Determinants of Essentiality", recent industry developments, contrast practical experiences, and the economic literature will be discussed, and potential topics for future research will be raised. Timo Ali-Vehmas, Nokia head of ecosystems research and former VP, compatibility and industry collaboration, will join for the presentation.

Moderation: Daria Kim

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, Raum 313

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313

Family background matters for entrepreneurship; however, the focus on factors making siblings similar rather than different may hide important sources of heterogeneity and understate the total importance of families. In a set of causal exercises using Swedish register data, I assess the differential effects of birth order, family size, and sibling sex composition on entrepreneurship. These factors appear to have a negligible impact. While later born men are more likely to become unincorporated entrepreneurs, this effect is largely explained by their lower education, pointing towards the subsistence nature of this type of entrepreneurship. I find no evidence of causal family size effects in linear and non-linear instrumental variable approaches, although there is a small negative effect of having a brother on the father-daughter association in unincorporated entrepreneurship. Finally, neither source of within-family heterogeneity exhibits a clear relationship with incorporated entrepreneurship. The results are consistent with the absence of adult sibling peer effects in entrepreneurship and confirm the role of families in generating sibling similarities, not differences. The importance of family background for entrepreneurship is therefore only marginally understated, and accounting for within-family differences increases previously estimated sibling correlations by little.

Ansprechpartnerin: Laura Rosendahl Huber, Ph.D.

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313

Abstract:
The digitization of economic activity has important socio-economic development implications and at the same time creates challenges for antitrust analysis. These implications and challenges have been met differently in jurisdictions around the world.  We analyze the different experiences in the EU and developing countries, focusing on mobile payments. We find that this market exhibits special characteristics that need to be taken into account in the analysis of competition conditions. First, it is enabled by mobile telecommunications infrastructure and is offered by network operators, which causes competition in both markets to be closely linked. Second, there is still regulatory arbitrage which potentially favors mobile payments. Third, there are factors, such as the lack of interoperability and geographical reach, that make network effects in this industry different from those present in other platforms. Fourth, since mobile payments in developing countries serve a niche—the population underserved by mainstream banking—the definition of the relevant market is not straightforward. We propose the criteria to be applied when making such definition. Finally, since mobile payments have associated financial services, there is an interaction between competition and financial stability that needs to be considered.

Hinweis: Dieses Seminar besitzt einen interdisziplinären Charakter und folgt einem neuartigem Format: Nach einem 30-minütigen Einführungsvortrag von Jörg und Paco werden wir uns während der Diskussion auf die ökonomischen Aspekte des Projekts konzentrieren.

Ansprechpartnerin: Zhaoxin Pu