The academic interest in IP and innovation parallels the policy debates regarding the costs and benefits of the patent system, the potential conflicts between strict IP enforcement and the development of digital distribution networks on the internet, the EC agenda of promoting innovation in Europe, as well as some well publicized cases on patent disputes. For this reason, despite an already extensive literature on IP and innovation and a good understanding of the basic trade-offs between static and dynamic effects, there is a continued interest in the issues. The papers in this symposium contribute to the literature by pointing out identification problems in empirical work and by providing a unifying framework for understanding how different effects interact. In so doing, the authors render the academic literature on IP and innovation more applicable for addressing some of the policy questions highlighted above.
The papers cover broadly four main themes, and we shall review them in the order they appear below.
Quality of Innovations. The papers by Régibeau and Rockett, ‘Innovation Cycles and Learning at the Patent Office: Does the Early Patent Get the Delay?’ and by Chan, ‘The Determinants of International Patenting for Nine Agricultural Biotechnology Firms,’ highlight the correlation between the quality of patents and other variables, such as the delay in having the patent processed (the first paper) or the number of international patent applications involved (the second paper).
Modes of Enforcement. The papers by Henry and Turner, ‘Patent Damages and Spatial Competition,’ and Harbaugh and Khemka, ‘Does Copyright Enforcement Encourage Piracy?’ focus on the static and dynamic effects of different legal systems of damages as well as on the welfare consequences of targeting enforcement on certain groups of end users.
Disclosure. The papers by Martimort, Poudou and Sand-Zantman, ‘Contracting for an Innovation under Bilateral Asymmetric Information,’ and by Jansen, ‘Strategic Information Disclosure and Competition for an Imperfectly Protected Innovation,’ revisit the question of how sharing of information about innovations is influenced by contracting and appropriability.
Modes of Competition. In ‘Innovation in Vertically Related Markets,’ Chen and Sappington analyze how downstream competition (Cournot versus Bertrand competition) affects innovation by an upstream firm when it vertically integrates.
