TY  - BOOK
AU  - Lerner,Josh
AU  - Tirole,Jean
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - Efficient Patent Pools
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2002///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - September 2002; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - 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 suñcient 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
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w9175
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w9175
ER  -