Giorgos Stamatopoulos

Licensing of a quality-improving innovation

We study the licensing of a quality-improving innovation in a duopoly model with heterogeneous consumers. Firms compete in prices facing a logit demand framework. The innovator is an outsider to the market and sells licenses via up front fee (determined in an auction), royalty or their combination. We show that if the market is covered then irrespective of the magnitude of the innovation both firms acquire the new technology and pay positive royalty and zero up-front fee. The increase in social welfare due to the innovation is totally extracted by the innovator. For the uncovered market case we show that if the consumer heterogeneity is sufficiently high, then both firms become licensees. The licensees pay positive royalty and zero up-front fee-if the value of an outside alternative option is low-and both positive royalty and positive up-front fee -- if the value of the outside alternative option is high.

Technology Transfer Under Returns to Scale

In this paper we consider the licensing of a cost-reducing innovation by an outside innovator that uses optimal combinations of upfront fees and royalties in a Cournot duopoly characterized by non-constant returns to scale. The main conclusion of our theoretical analysis is that incidence of positive royalties and diffusion of innovations are both inversely related to economies of scale. Our analysis provides a plausible explanation of the variation of licensing policies across industries.

On the superiority of fixed fee over auction in asymmetric markets

It is well known that selling licenses for the use of a cost-reducing innovation by auction yields a higher revenue compared to fixed fee in a symmetric Cournot industry. In this note we show that this result can be reversed in an asymmetric Cournot industry, i.e., the fixed fee policy can generate a strictly higher revenue than the auction policy in an industry where prior to the innovation firms are cost-asymmetric.

When an inefficient competitor makes higher profit than its efficient rival

We consider a Cournot duopoly with strategic delegation, where quantities of firms are chosen by their managers. A firm can offer its manager one of the two incentive contracts: the profit incentive or the revenue incentive. We show that in this setting there are Nash equilibria in which an inefficient firm obtains higher profit than its efficient rival.

Cooperative oligopoly games with boundedly rational firms

We analyze cooperative Cournot games with boundedly rational firms. Due to cognitive constraints, the members of a coalition cannot accurately predict the coalitional structure of the non-members. Thus, they compute their value using simple heuristics. In particular, they assign various non-equilibrium probability distributions over the outsiders’ set of partitions. We construct the characteristic function of a coalition in such an environment and we analyze the core of the corresponding games. We show that the core is non-empty provided the number of firms in the market is sufficiently large. Moreover, we show that if two distributions over the set of partitions are related via first-order dominance, then the core of the game under the dominated distribution is a subset of the core under the dominant distribution.

STRATEGIC DELEGATION IN A STACKELBERG GAME WITH MULTIPLE STAGES

We analyze strategic delegation in a Stackelberg model with an arbitrary number, n, of firms. We show that n-1 firms delegate their production decisions and only one firm (the one whose manager is the first mover) does not. The later a manager commits to a quantity, the higher his incentive rate. Letting

Decreasing Returns, Patent Licensing and Price-Reducing Taxes

u_i^*

Location equilibrium with asymmetric firms: the role of licensing

denote the equilibrium payoff of the firm whose manager commits in the ith stage, we show that

Drastic innovations and multiplicity of optimal licensing policies

u_n^*>u_{n-1}^*>\cdots>u_2^*>u_1^*

A Game-Theoretic Model of Coalition Formation Among Primates

. We also compare the delegation outcome of our game with that of a corresponding Cournot oligopoly and show that managers who commit late (early) are given higher (lower) incentive rates than managers in the Cournot market.