演講者簡介 : Professor Lee received his Ph.D. in Economics from University of California, Los Angeles in 1992. He is currently a Professor at Seoul National University. His research interest is Microeconomics.
演講摘要 : Coase Theorem argues that if property rights are well defined and efficient bargaining mechanism exists, then the allocation of property rights does not matter. However recent regulations by anti-competition authorities indicate that the allocation of intellectual property right plays an important role in the performance of markets.
Consider a product which is produced by vertically related firms over multiple stages. Suppose that there is a patent which reads on the technology used by all the firms over the stages. Since the value of the patent originates from the utility enjoyed by the consumers, it is best measured at the end product market. Under the Coase theorem, it may not matter where the patent fee is collected; if the intellectual property rights represented by the patent is well defined and there is an efficient bargaining mechanism among the licensor and the licensees, the performance of the market does not depend on licensing system. However, patent is not defined well enough and there is no efficient bargaining mechanism so that the licensing system matters. In particular subject to the patent exhaustion policy, the licensing practice by the firm with patent reading on multiple production stages has to solve a difficult problem of reducing transaction cost in the technology markets.
