Events

The next Institute Seminar will take place on Tuesday, October 14, 2014, at 6 pm in room E 10 of the main building.

Panagiotis Tsangaris will lecture on "Capacity constraints in the electricity spot market: between competition law and REMIT". Henri de Belsunce will moderate.

Please be aware that all scholarship holders of the departments for Intellectual Property and Competition Law are expected to attend. A list of participants will be kept.

By invitation only!

We outline a set of steps that could lead to new quantitative analysis and understanding of science policy based on scientifically grounded conceptual framework and large-scale computational analysis of scientific activity. Getting the right conceptual and empirical framework matters, lest resources and people get squandered because incentives are wrong. Getting an empirical framework based on something other than anecdotes matters, to avoid substantive misunderstandings about the process of science. Seizing the opportunity presented by the explosion in digital information about research products and processes, will require both substantial effort to acquire, integrate, curate, and evolve large quantities of information from many sources, and much innovation in both science policy research and computational methods.

In this paper, we design two laboratory experiments to analyze the causal effects of competition on step-by-step innovation. Innovations result from costly R&D investments and move technology up one step. Competition is inversely measured by the ex post rents for firms that operate at the same technological level, i.e. for neck-and-neck firms. First, we find that increased competition leads to a significant increase in R&D investments by neck-and-neck firms. Second, increased competition decreases R&D investments by firms that are lagging behind, in particular if the time horizon is short. Third, we find that increased competition affects industry composition by reducing the fraction of sectors where firms are neck-and-neck. All these results are consistent with the predictions of step-by-step innovation models.

The next Institute Seminar will take place on Tuesday, September 9, 2014, at 6 pm in room E 10 of the main building.

Franciska Schönherr will lecture on "The Construction of an EU Copyright Law - Towards a Balanced Legal Framework". Philipp Eckl will moderate.

Please be aware that all scholarship holders of the departments for Intellectual Property and Competition Law are expected to attend. A list of participants will be kept.

Current economic analyses of intellectual property regimes on international trade reveal ambiguous results, suggesting a general positive impact on trade flows but with strong dependence on the status of trade openness, national innovation system, qualitative development level of industrial structures or the focussed industrial sectors. This project targets on the analysis of factors which influence the impact of intellectual property on international trade competitiveness of economies, industrial sectors or enterprises. It focuses on the integrated analysis of relevant determinants in four areas: 1. factors of national innovation system, 2. structures of intellectual property protection policies and strategies applied by economic subjects, 3. factors of innovation and competition conduct, and 4. factors of competitive position in international trade. The project analyses export orientated sectors of the German economy at the aggregated national and disaggregated sectoral level and selected multinational enterprises between 2004 and 2014.

We know little about the effects of patent licensing because licensing information is notoriously difficult to find. Using publicly available data we construct a novel means of indirectly identifying academic patents that have been licensed to large corporations. We estimate the signaling effects of patent licensing on subsequent innovation. We find that after licensing patents have considerably more citations. The signaling effect of licensing by universities with a large flow of patents is similar for public and private universities. For universities with a small flow of patents, relative to Small public universities, a license of a patent owned by a private university to a large company leads to significantly more citations. The results suggest that licensing of small private university patents sends significantly stronger and more informative signal to out-of-state innovators who, influenced by the perceptions about university technology management practices across different types of universities, might be generally suspicious about the quality and potential of patents owned by small private universities.