Veranstaltungen

We use hand-collected data from four German crowdinvesting portals to analyze what determines individual investment decisions in crowdinvesting. In contrast with the crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter where the typical pattern of project support is U-shaped, we find crowdinvesting dynamics to be rather L-shaped under a first-come, first-serve mechanism and U-shaped under an auction mechanism. The evidence shows that investors base their decisions on information provided by the entrepreneur in form of updates during the campaign and by the investment behavior and comments of other crowd investors. Moreover, we find evidence for a collective attention effect and herding behavior.

Link: https://www.uni-trier.de/index.php?id=54970

This paper studies the determinants of investment in legal advice by plaintiffs in patent litigation. A hand-collected sample of US patent litigation cases is used to identify the empirical factors that determine the number of legal counsels employed by the plaintiffs. It turns out that more valuable patents lead to a higher investment in legal advice. Large firms, and plaintiffs with large patent portfolios employ more counsels, whereas individual litigants employ fewer. Software patents are related to a lower investment by the plaintiffs. These findings help not only to understand the cost drivers of litigation but have also important implications for the discussions on software patents, and the role of the litigant status for litigation success.

Institutsseminar: Sujitha Subramanian wird sprechen über "Green Technology Patenting in the Refrigerant Gas Sector and the Climate Change Politics in Europe".

The use of debt to finance risky entrepreneurial-firm projects is rife with informational and contracting problems. Nonetheless, we document widespread lending to startups in three innovation-intensive sectors and in early stages of development. At odds with claims that the secondary patent market is too illiquid to shape debt financing, we find that intensified patent trading increases the annual rate of startup lending, particularly for startups with more redeployable (less firm-specific) patent assets. Exploiting differences in venture capital (VC) fundraising cycles and a negative capital-supply shock in early 2000, we also find that the credibility of VC commitments to refinance and grow fledgling companies is vital for such lending. Our study illuminates friction-reducing mechanisms in the market for venture lending, a surprisingly active but opaque arena for innovation financing, and tests central tenets of contract theory.

Das nächste Institutsseminar findet am Dienstag, 10. Februar 2015 um 18.00 Uhr s.t. im Raum E 10, Hauptgebäude, statt.

Sunimal Mendis wird sprechen über "Copyright, Digitization and the Public Domain: Is there a need for exclusive rights over digitized versions of rare public domain material in Europe?". Alina Wernick wird moderieren.

Das nächste Institutsseminar findet am Dienstag, 11. November 2014 um 18.00 Uhr s.t. im Raum E 10, Hauptgebäude, statt.

Natalia Lukaszewicz wird sprechen über "A study on patent use exception for user-generated inventions. The Maker movement meets patent law".Franciska Schönherr wird moderieren.