Thomas Giebe

License auctions with royalty contracts for (winners and) losers

This paper revisits the licensing of a non-drastic process innovation by an outside innovator to a Cournot oligopoly. We propose a new mechanism that combines a restrictive license auction with royalty licensing. This mechanism is more profitable than standard license auctions, auctioning royalty contracts, fixed-fee licensing, pure royalty licensing, and two-part tariffs. The key features are that royalty contracts are auctioned and that losers of the auction are granted the option to sign a royalty contract. Remarkably, combining royalties for winners and losers of the auction makes the integer constraint concerning the number of licenses irrelevant.

Bayesian Optimal Knapsack Procurement

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a shortlisted set. Items are differentiated by observable quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. The buyer’s problem is to select a subset of maximal quality. Money does not enter the buyer’s objective function, but only his constraints. Sellers quote prices strategically, inducing a knapsack game. We report the Bayesian optimal mechanism for the buyer’s problem. We find that simultaneous take-it-or-leave-it offers are interim optimal.

Competitors in Merger Control: Shall They Be Merely Heard or Also Listened To?

There are legal grounds to hear competitors in merger control proceedings, and competitor involvement has gained significance. To what extent this is economically sensible is our question. The competition authority applies some welfare standard while the competitor cares about its own profit. In general, but not always, this implies a conflict of interest. We formally model this setting with cheap talk signaling games, where hearing the competitor might convey valuable information to the authority, but also serve the competitors own interests. We find that the authority will mostly have to ignore the competitor but, depending on the authoritys own prior information, strictly following the competitors selfish recommendation will improve the authoritys decision. Complementary to our analysis, we provide empirical data of competitor involvement in EU merger cases and give an overview of the legal discussion in the EU and US.