Prof. Timothy Simcoe (University of Toronto)

Programm

• Datum: 12.05.2009
  Zeit: 17:45 - 19:00
  Ort: Raum 307, Schackstr. 4, III. OG

Competing on Standards? Entrepreneurship, Intellectual Property and Platform Technologies

Entrepreneurs often rely on intellectual property (IP) to earn a return on their innovations, and also compatibility standards, which allow them to supply specialized components for a shared technology platform. This paper compares the IP strategies of small entrepreneurs and large incumbents that disclose patents at thirteen voluntary Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs). These patents have a relatively high litigation rate. For small private firms, the probability of filing a lawsuit increases after disclosure to the SSO. For large public firms, the filing rate is unchanged. While forward citations increase after disclosure for all firms, the size of this effect is the same for entrepreneurs and incumbents. These results suggest that standards increase the difference between large and small firms’ incentives to litigate, rather than the relative value of their patents. We conclude that when specialized technology providers cannot seek rents downstream, they will defend IP more aggressively once it has been incorporated into an open platform.

• Datum: 13.05.2009
  Zeit: 10:15 - 11:45
  Ort: Raum 202, Kaulbachstr. 45

Standard Setting Committees

Voluntary Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs) use a consensus process to create new compatibility standards. Practitioners have suggested that SSOs are increasingly politicized and perhaps incapable of producing timely standards. This paper develops a simple model of standard setting committees and tests its predictions using data from the Internet Engineering Task Force, an SSO that produces many of the standards used to run the Internet. The results show that an observed slow down in standards production between 1993 and 2003 can be linked to distributional conflicts created by the rapid commercialization of the Internet.

• Datum: 20.05.2009
  Zeit: 17:15 - 18:45
  Ort: Raum 024, Ludwigstr. 28 / RG

Choosing the Rules for Consensus Standardization

Consensus standardization often involves bargaining without side payments or substantive compromise, creating a war of attrition that selects through delay. We investigate the tradeo between screening and delay when this process selects for socially valuable but privately observed quality. Immediate random choice may outperform the war of attrition, or vice versa. Allowing an uninformed neutral player to break deadlocks can improve on both mechanisms. Policies that reduce players' vested interest, and hence delays, can strengthen the ex ante incentive to improve proposals.