Cerna, the Center of Industrial Economics of the Ecole des mines de Paris, offers a PhD position to work on patents and standards in mobile telecommunications.
The number of cooperative technology standards ensuring compatibility between competing products has increased enormously in the past 20 years, especially in Information and Communication industries (DVD, MPEG, GSM, UMTS…). Innovators have an obvious interest in their patents being chosen by standards developers, since widespread adoption of their patents means that they will receive royalties from a large number of license holders. On the one hand, cooperative R&D can be largely undertaken for many complementary technologies must be put together to create a standard that is useful. On the other hand, competition between technology firms in standard-setting bodies can be fierce as each firm seeks to prove the superiority of its innovation and thus influence the choice of standard of its own patent portfolio. Alongside this above-board rivalry and pro-competitive coordination is the danger of anticompetitive behaviour. A firm can deliberately hide the fact that it owns an essential patent in order to hold-up the manufacturers once they have invested around the standard. Patent holders can also collude to foreclose the technological market and get higher royalties.
The goal of the thesis is to undertake an economic analysis of pro and anticompetitive effects of patents strategies in standards.
Until now, most of literature has focused on patent pools, that is, on the way to reduce transactions costs for standard’s users and to mitigate the multi-marginalisation, or Cournot, problem. By contrast, the thesis will be mainly devoted to ex ante patent strategies, e.g. strategies that took place before the standard is adopted. A special emphasis will be put on patent disclosure rules, the commitment to set reasonable royalties and the features of the R&D competition and cooperation.
The empirical part of the thesis will focus on mobile telecommunications, especially on patent strategies regarding G3 technologies (W-CDMA and UMTS) and mobile TV (DVB-H, MediaFlo).
The job is open to candidates from France or any other country. French speaking is not required. Training in Microeconomics, Econometrics, Industrial Organization, or Economics of Innovation would be appreciated.
The thesis will take place at Cerna within the Law and Industrial Economics team, under the supervision of Professor François Lévêque. It takes place in the wider framework of a research programme on intellectual property. The proposed scholarship is approximately 1400 € monthly.
Contact: meniere[ at ]cerna.ensmp.fr
Application has to be received by 31. October 2007.
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