Giovanni Battista Ramello

What's in a Sign? Trademark Law and Economic Theory

The aim of this paper is to summarize the extant theory as it relates to the economics of trademark, and to give some suggestions for further research with reference to distinct streams of literature. The proposed line of study inevitably looks at the complex relationship between signs and economics. Copyright 2006 The Authors Journal compilation

Property, Liability and Market Power: The Antitrust Side of Copyright

This paper investigates the interplay between copyright law and antitrust law in two distinct respects. We first argue that the origin of copyright seems to be rooted not only in the need to foster the production and the spread of knowledge but also in the necessity of limiting market power on the side of distributors. We then show the potential impact on market competition of the evolution of copyright as a property rule. While property rules reduce transaction costs in the standard case of bilateral monopoly over the exchange of information goods, they might increase transaction costs. When coupled with market power, a property rule enables the right holder to control uses and prices so as to implement entry deterrence strategies against potential competitors. Conversely, we argue that reversing property rules in favor of competitors or switching to liability rules for copyright may restore competitive outcomes. This conclusion brings new insights on the application of the essential facility doctrine to copyrighted works.

Publishing an E-Journal on a Shoe String: Is It a Sustainable Project?

The aim of this article is to report on an experiment in publishing an open access journal and learn from it about the larger field of open access publishing. The experiment is the launch of the European Journal of Comparative Economics (EJCE), an on-line refereed and open access journal, founded in 2004 by the European Association for Comparative Economic Studies and LIUC University in Italy. They embarked upon this project in part to respond to the rising concentration in the market for scientific publishing and the resulting use of market power to raise subscription prices and restrict access to scientific output. We had hoped that open access journals could provide some countervailing power and increase competition in the field. Our experience running a poorly endowed journal has shown that entry to the field may be easy, yet that making it a sustainable enterprise is not straightforward.

Access to vs. Exclusion from Knowledge: Intellectual Property, Efficiency and Social Justice

The main rationale for intellectual property relies on the thesis of the incentive to create. Creators and inventors are economic agents attracted by the returns they expect from their effort. This depiction is practical, but does not give due weight to the complexity of knowledge production. This work does not contest the potential benefit of the opportunity for creators and inventors to reap some profit from their work. Rather, it considers the idiosyncratic nature of knowledge, which is simultaneously input, output and productive technology, and is closely linked to the social dimension. This provides further insight into the production process and suggests a significantly different framework for policy. More specifically, because of the increasing returns governing creative technology, the efficiency criterion used to guide the economic choice calls for weak intellectual property rights, thus preserving wide access to knowledge. A stronger appropriation regime would significantly impair the total outcome of the creative processes. Interestingly, this appears to apply equally from a social justice perspective, perhaps in an effortless solution to the age-old trade-off between economic efficiency and social justice.

Judicial productivity, delay and efficiency: A Directional Distance Function (DDF) approach

The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it provides a contribution to the debate on judicial efficiency by conducting an applied research on the Italian tax judiciary thanks to a database covering the activities of the Italian tax courts over a 3-year period (2009–2011). On the other hand, it also contributes to the methodological debate, as it compares results obtained with Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Directional Distance Function (DDF), two related non-parametric techniques which allow evaluating the efficiency of each observation as the radial distance from the efficient frontier defined by the best observations. While DEA has already been used to assess the mere technical efficiency of judicial systems, the DDF offers a valuable additional contribution, since it makes it possible to minimize the social cost of production of adjudication in the measurement. This feature makes it particularly attractive in those sectors in which production externalities may arise, such as judicial delays in the case investigated here. Additionally, the paper first applies the bootstrap to the DDF procedure in order to provide more robust estimates and to compare them with the DEA results.

Open Access, Social Norms & Publication Choice

The aim of this paper is to shed light on scholarly communication and its current trajectories by examining academics’ perception of Open Access, while also providing a reference case for studying social norm change. In this respect, the issue of publication choice and the role of Open Access journals casts light on the changes affecting the scientific community and its institutional arrangements for validating and circulating new research. The empirical investigation conducted also offers a useful vantage point for gauging the importance of localised social norms in guiding and constraining behaviour. JEL classification: K19, Z13, O33, L17

The simple economics of class action: private provision of club and public goods

This article uses economic categories to show how the reorganisation of civil procedure in the case of class action is not merely aimed at providing a more efficient litigation technology, as hierarchies (and company law) might do for other productive activities, but that it also serves to create a well defined economic organization ultimately aimed at producing a set of goods, first and foremost among which are justice and efficiency. Class action has the potential to recreate, in the judicial domain, the same effects that individual interests and motivations, governed by the perfect competition paradigm, bring to the market. Moreover, through economic analysis it is possible to rediscover not only the productive function of this legal machinery, but also that partial compensation of victims and large profits for the class counsel, far from being a side-effect, are actually a necessary condition for reallocation of the costs and risks associated with the legal action.

Copyright and Antitrust Issues

This paper examines the relationships between copyright and competition law, paying special attention to the elements of conflict which have repeatedly emerged from recent antitrust cases in both the United States and Europe. In particular, the thesis argued is that the framework of intellectual property rights is crucial to antitrust evaluations because of the deterministic relation which exists between property rights on the one hand, and market structure and modes of competition on the other. In consideration of this relationship, it will be shown that several purportedly anti-competitive behaviours are in reality of an ambiguous character when considered within the system of incentives defined by copyright. What is more, given that copyright is essentially a calculated restriction on competition introduced by legislators to correct a specific market failure (i.e., creation of a sub-optimal level of copyrightable works), it then becomes quite difficult to pursue anti-competitive behaviours in a manner consistent with the nature of copyright and the incentives system. The work also shows how scholars are confronted with a structural weakness in the economic theory, vis-a-vis the current needs of antitrust enforcement in markets regulated by copyright. This weakness is probably attributable to the fact that the theory principally grew out of a study of the structure and dynamics of the manufacturing industries, and has therefore produced analysis tools geared to that particular context. However such tools are not ideally suited to the markets of information goods protected by copyright, which have modes of competition that differ substantially from those of the sectors which produce tangible goods.

Intellectual Property and the Markets of Ideas

This article summarizes the law and economics theory of IPRs, while at the same time suggests hints for further research. The standard literature on IPRs generally relies on the thesis of the incentive to create new ideas. Although this argument remains valid in the general case, in several circumstances it fails to take into account various consequences arising from the dynamic effect of IPRs on the market structure. The main conclusion is that the economic evaluation of IP based on a more suitable representation of creative contexts might reveal a different balance of welfare and lead to different policy indications.

Class Action and Financial Markets: Insights from Law and Economics

According to the law and economics approach, pure economic loss is a private loss that is not socially relevant but simply implies a redistribution of wealth. Consequently, wrongful behavior that induces reallocation of costs and benefits with no consequences on social welfare is not considered socially harmful, so is not necessarily subject to compensation. Since pure economic loss is very often financial, the above reasoning also applies to financial markets. However, the same law and economics arguments suggest that in financial markets, the policy of internalizing pure economic loss by means of class actions can be more far-sighted than simply compensating the victims: the liability system has the particular feature of producing deterrence and driving the market towards an efficient outcome. In this vein, the paper argues that class action intended as a complementary ex-post regulatory device can play a significant role in addressing a failure that ex-ante regulation has not. This is coherent with the law and economics tradition that interprets tort law remedies as a solution for internalizing externality and providing the correct incentive to the markets.