Current Unpublished Work
“Licensing Standards to Competitors”,
Abstract: We
consider licensing of any technology that exhibits network externalities. We
study the case where the licensor is one of the n firms competing in an
oligopolistic market. In such a context a new incentive for licensing (added to
the ex-ante and
ex-post ones) appears when the network is increased by the licensing
policy, the network incentive. Sufficient conditions for market
standardization are provided. A drastic innovation may be licensed even when
the nonlicensing policy would imply the licensor
being a monopolist. It is not always guaranteed that the licensor sets a
royalty amount that extracts all technological rents from licensees. Finally,
an example with a three firm industry and a linear externality is solved
finding that fees are superior to royalties from both the social and the
licensor point of view.
Keywords: Licensing, network externalities, standardization.
“Manufacturers’ Commitments and the Number of
Retailers”, co-authored with Rafael Moner-Colonques and Yair Tauman.
Abstract: We
examine the strategic incentives of two manufacturers in a homogeneous good
market to use independent agents to compete in the market. We find that the Subgame Perfect Nash equilibrium involves that each
manufacturer is not an active seller and uses only one retailer. Furthermore,
the variable part of the two-part tariff is set below the marginal cost of
production. The equilibrium is Pareto dominated by the outcome obtained when
manufacturers sell themselves directly to consumers without using retailers.
Keywords: Retail distribution, strategic incentives.