Catherine Roux

Are Joint Patents Collusive? Evidence from the US and Europe

We investigate whether patents that are jointly held by legally independent companies help sustain product-market collusion. We use a simple model of repeated interactions to show that joint patents can serve collusive purposes. Our model generates two testable predictions: when joint patents are held for collusive purposes, a) there is a positive relationship between the propensity to jointly own a patent and proximity in the product market; b) joint patents are associated with less licensing in the market for technology than individually owned patents, especially when firms are close product-market competitors. We construct a large, novel dataset that contains information on patents, research joint ventures, and licensing at the firm-level for the US and the EU to validate our theoretical predictions. We exploit differences in the legal regimes applicable to joint patents in the US and Europe to show that the data is consistent with our theoretical predictions.

Shared Ownership of Intangible Property Rights: The Case of Patent Coassignments

We show that the legal rules regarding the ability of co-owners of patents to license the patented technology to third parties have important implications not only for licensing, the diffusion of the patented technology, and hence downstream competition but also for the decision to share ownership in the first place. The legal rules that regulate shared ownership also affect efforts provided by the parties at the invention stage and hence impact the quality of the patented technology. We rely on exogenous legal differences between the United States and Europe concerning the ability of co-owners of patents to license the patented technology to third parties to show that the data are consistent with our theoretical predictions.