Lerner, Josh. <br/><br/>
Efficient Patent Pools / 
Josh Lerner, Jean Tirole. 
 - Cambridge, Mass.  National Bureau of Economic Research  2002. 
 - 1 online resource:  illustrations (black and white); 
 - NBER working paper series  no. w9175 .
 - Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research)  no. w9175. .
<br/><br/> September 2002. 
<br/><br/> The paper builds a tractable model of a patent pool, an agreement among patent owners to license a set of their patents to one another or to third parties. It first provides a necessary and suńcient condition for a patent pool to enhance welfare. It shows that requiring pool members to be able to independently license patents matters if and only if the pool is otherwise welfare reducing, a property that allows the antitrust authorities to use this requirement to screen out unattractive pools. The paper then undertakes a number of extensions. It evaluates the  external test' according to which patents with substitutes should not be included in a pool; analyzes the welfare implications of the reduction in the members' incentives to invent around or challenge the validity of each other's patents; looks at the rationale for the (common) provision of automatic assignment of future related patents to the pool; and, last, studies the intellectual property owners' incentives to form a pool or to cross-license when they themselves are users of the patents in the pool. 
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<br/><br/><br/>System requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files. <br/>Mode of access: World Wide Web.