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This paper examines the economic logic underlying so-called 'first mover advantages' as alternatives to patent protection in allowing innovators protection from immediate imitation and time to recoup their research and development investments. These include a head start, lower costs due to learning by doing, and product-differentiating reputational advantages. William Nordhaus' theory of optimal patent protection is extended to cases of product, as distinguished from cost-saving, innovation. Over the parameters covered by a simulation analysis, profit potentials sufficient to induce R&D investment are found much more frequently than R&D incentive failures. R&D failures occur most commonly in small markets and situations in which imitators' erosion of the innovator's market share is particularly rapid. Implications for patent policy are drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The histories of two ‘great’ US monopolization cases involving high‐technology monopolies are summarized in this article. Its foci are the practices that led to antitrust intervention, the timeliness of antitrust challenges, how the relevant authorities evaluated the role that innovation played as a possible explanation for monopoly, the remedies applied, and how those remedies affected incentives for continuing technological progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the question of whether global welfare is higher under a uniform world-wide system of pharmaceutical product patents or with international rules allowing low-income nations to free-ride on the discoveries of firms in rich nations. Key variables include the extent to which free-riding reduces the discovery of new drugs, the rent potential of rich as compared to poor nations, the ratio of the marginal utility of income in poor as compared to rich nations, and the competitive environment within which R&D decisions are made. Global welfare is found to be higher with free-riding across plausible discovery impairment and income utility combinations, especially when rent-seeking behaviour leads to an expansion of R&D outlays exhausting appropriable rents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]