Skip to main content
No Access

Shared Ownership of Intangible Property Rights: The Case of Patent Coassignments

andrea fosfuri is a Professor of Management and Technology and a member of the Center of Research in Innovation, Organization, and Strategy at Bocconi University. christian helmers is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Santa Clara University. catherine roux is an Assistant Professor of Industrial Organization and Regulation of Energy Markets at the University of Basel and a member of the Competence Center for Research in Energy, Society, and Transition. We thank Edward Morrison and an anonymous referee for their comments, which have greatly improved the paper. We also thank Iain Cockburn, Joseph Harrington, Brian Love, John Mayo, Michael Mazzeo, Asrat Tesfayesus, Esther van Zimmeren, and participants of the 2011 European Policy for Intellectual Property Association conference (Brussels), the 2012 Innovation, Intellectual Property, and Competition workshop (Tilburg), the 2012 annual meeting of the Academy of Management (Boston), the 2013 Centre for European Economic Research/Mannheim Centre for Competition and Innovation Conference on the Economics of Innovation and Patenting (Mannheim), the 2014 annual meeting of the European Association for Research in Industrial Economics (Milan), the 12th annual International Industrial Organization Conference (Chicago), the 9th annual Searle Center/US Patent and Trademark Office Conference on Innovation Economics, and seminars at the Technical University of Munich, Pompeu Fabra University, the University of Leuven, Rovira i Virgili University, the University of St. Gallen, and the World Intellectual Property Organization for useful comments on earlier versions of this paper. We are particularly grateful to Dogan Dalay and Julian Egli for excellent research assistance. We also thank all survey respondents for their generous input. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from a Tilburg Law and Economics Center Innovation, Intellectual Property, and Competition Policy grant.

We show that the legal rules regarding the ability of co-owners of patents to license the patented technology to third parties have important implications not only for licensing, the diffusion of the patented technology, and hence downstream competition but also for the decision to share ownership in the first place. The legal rules that regulate shared ownership also affect efforts provided by the parties at the invention stage and hence impact the quality of the patented technology. We rely on exogenous legal differences between the United States and Europe concerning the ability of co-owners of patents to license the patented technology to third parties to show that the data are consistent with our theoretical predictions.