“Just Taking a Break? “Hiatists” in Online Communities
Presenter: Sophia Wetzler (ISTO)
Discussant: Dominik Asam (Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition)
All online communities depend on active volunteer engagement to sustain themselves and flourish. Experienced community members are particularly valuable because they are familiar with the community’s standards and practices. However, prior research has primarily studied active community members while overlooking experienced community members in hiatus. We want to fill this gap. We conceptualize hiatus as a complete but temporary pause in regular engagement, distinct from engagement decreases or attrition. Based on an extensive dataset of inner-community competitions on the software crowdsourcing platform “Topcoder”, we study pre-, within-, and post-hiatus behavior. In our analysis, we identify hiatus-taking to be driven by a lack of success, a scarcity of communication options within the community, and peer evaluations, which motivate experienced members but deter beginners. We further provide explorative evidence regarding “hiatists’” within-hiatus activities and post-hiatus performance and find that hiatus-taking often reflects a shift towards related activities.
Standard Development Cost as an Economic Anchor for FRAND Determination
Presenter: Christian Untch (TUM)
Discussant: Frederike Eulitz (ISTO)
Owners of standard-essential patents (SEPs) on communication standards such as 5G and Wi-Fi are obliged to license their SEPs on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms. In court cases, FRAND terms are often defined based on comparable licenses or, in a top-down approach, on an assumed royalty for the standard’s entire SEP stack. We argue that both approaches lack an economic anchor, and hence neither of them can guarantee fair and reasonable outcomes. We argue that the cost of standard development constitutes the only anchor based on economic reasoning since it allows determining a return rate. Combining qualitative evidence from expert interviews with large-scale quantitative data on standard participation, patenting activity, and licensing revenues, we estimate for the period 2014 to 2020 the development and licensing costs of cellular and Wi-Fi standards and contrast them with realized SEP royalties. We find that, for the six major licensors, aggregate revenues from SEP licensing are nearly eleven times as large as estimated development costs, even under conservative assumptions. Considering the value of cross-licensing and own use of SEPs in the owner’s products, this estimation is almost fourteen times. Even allowing for a risk premium, this ratio seems far too large to be fair and reasonable. Our results have implications for ongoing policy debates on SEP regulation and for the economic assessment of licensing practices in standard-based industries. As a theoretical contribution, we show that standard development cost is the only economic anchor for determining FRAND royalties.
Can Interdisciplinarity Spur the Translation of Science to Technology? Evidence from China’s Elite University Faculty Reforms
Presenter: Michael E. Rose (Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition)
Discussant: Dekai Xiao (TUM)
We study whether interdisciplinary academic collaboration improves the translation of science into technology. We study half a million patent applications filed by China's “985” universities during 2005 and 2020. In China, academics are traditionally highly engaged in patenting activities for institutional reasons (application fees are waived, patent attorneys are covered, patents are part of academic evaluation). To establish causality, we exploit the staggered introduction of universities faculties. Starting in 2002, universities were allowed to combine their departments, which were organized by discipline, into faculties with a common administration and academic community. We present results from staggered Diff-in-diff regressions along three dimensions: (1) patent applications do not span more technology areas; (2) patents applications are more likely to be granted at the CNIPA as well as at the EPO, USPTO or JPO; (3) granted Chinese patents are more likely to be transferred, but less likely to be licensed.