Yassine Lefouili

Optimal licensing of uncertain patents in the shadow of litigation

This paper investigates the choice of a licensing mechanism by the holder of a patent whose validity is uncertain. We provide sufficient conditions of a general nature under which the licensor prefers to use a per-unit royalty contract. In particular we show that this is the case for the holders of weak patents if the strategic effect of an increase in a potential licensees unit cost on the equilibrium industry profit is positive. The latter condition is shown to hold in a Cournot (resp. Bertrand) oligopoly with homogeneous (resp. differentiated) products under general assumptions on the demands faced by firms. As a byproduct of our analysis, we contribute to the literature on the cost paradox in oligopoly by offering some new insights of independent interest regarding the effects of cost variations on Cournot and Bertrand equilibria.

Cross-Licensing and Competition

We study bilateral cross-licensing agreements among N (>2) competing firms. We find that the industry-profit-maximizing royalty can be sustained as the outcome of bilaterally efficient agreements. This holds regardless of whether agreements are public or private and whether firms compete in quantities or prices. We extend this monopolization result to a general class of two-stage games in which firms bilaterally agree in the first stage to make each other payments that depend on their second-stage non-cooperative actions. Policy implications regarding the antitrust treatment of cross-licensing agreements are derived.

Tying in Two-Sided Markets with Multi-Homing: Corrigendum and Comment

We identify two issues in Chois (2010) paper on tying in two-sided markets published in this Journal, and provide solutions to both of them. First, we point out that the equilibrium in the absence of tying requires more restrictive conditions and does not satisfy a natural equilibrium refinement criterion. We offer an alternative timing structure that validates the equilibrium derived in Choi (2010) under the conditions provided there. Second, we show that his equilibrium analysis with tying ignores a profitable deviation. We rectify this analysis under our alternative timing structure and derive the (mixed-strategy) equilibrium with tying. We also show by means of simulations that tying is welfare-enhancing whenever it is profitable, which is consistent with the main finding in Choi (2010).

Patent Licensing Networks

This paper investigates the patent licensing networks formed by competing firms. Assuming that licensing agreements can involve the payment of fixed fees only and that firms compete a la Cournot, we show that the complete network is always bilaterally efficient and that the monopoly network is bilaterally efficient if the patents are complementary enough. In the case of independent patents, we fully characterize the bilaterally efficient networks and find that when the cost reduction resulting from getting access to a competitors technology is large enough, the complete network is the only bilaterally efficient one. We also show that the bilaterally efficient networks can be sustained as subgame-perfect Nash equilibria with symmetric payoffs. This implies that the Pareto-dominance criterion selects the network that maximizes industry profits when more than one bilaterally efficient network exists.