Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/326904 
Year of Publication: 
2024
Series/Report no.: 
UNU-MERIT Working Papers No. 2024-008
Publisher: 
United Nations University (UNU), Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT), Maastricht
Abstract: 
Many scholars observed changes in the intellectual property rights systems in the 1980s and 1990s throughout the world. Patent systems in particular seemed to be expanding their scope, and the legal system seemed to be changing its attitudes towards intellectual property rights. At the same time, and probably in response, firms started to change their patenting behaviour by treating patents as tools of competition and bargaining rather than as a means to protect the fruits of intellectual labour. In this paper we present a simulation model that can be used to discuss that shift. Firms search for new technologies and patent what they find. But different firms have different strategies: one is to protect an invention; a second is to protect a technology space; the third is to attack others' technology spaces. In the literature the latter two have been described as different types of blocking. We examine different IPR regimes, characterized by who is able to infringe whose patent rights . This is an extreme case of who is able to extract rents from a given configuration of patent rights.
Subjects: 
Innovation
Patents
Knowledge network
Blocking strategies
JEL: 
O31
O34
C60
L50
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-sa Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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