TY  - JOUR
AU  - Lerner,Josh
AU  - Tirole,Jean
TI  - Efficient Patent Pools
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 9175
PY  - 2002
Y2  - September 2002
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9175
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9175.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Josh Lerner
Harvard Business School
Rock Center 214
Boston, MA 02163
Tel: 617/495-6065
Fax: 617/496-7357
E-Mail: jlerner@hbs.edu

Jean Tirole
Institut d'Economie Industrielle
Bureau MF529 - Bat. F
21 allees de Brienne
31000 Toulouse
FRANCE
Tel: 33-561-128642
E-Mail: tirole@cict.fr
AB  - 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.
ER  -