Patent licensing, bargaining, and product positioning

Innovators who have developed advanced technologies, along with launching new products by themselves, often license these technologies to their rivals. When a firm launches a new product, product positioning is also an important matter. We consider a standard linear city model with two firms in which the licenser and the licensee negotiate on licensing and engage in Nash bargaining after they determine their product positions. We investigate how the bargaining power of the licenser affects the product positions of the firms. We find that the licenser more likely chooses the central position when its bargaining power is weak whereas the product position of the licenser accelerates price competition between the firms. We also discuss the welfare implication. We find that the inverse U shape relationship between the bargaining power of the licenser and total social surplus, i.e., neither too strong nor too weak bargaining power of the licensor is optimal.

Licensing of Floating Nominal Modifiers and Unaccusativity in Japanese

Licensing of VP-internal floating nominal modifiers (FNMs), including numeral quantifiers, has been used as a diagnostic test for unaccusativity in Japanese, under the assumption that FNMs and their associates must be in a local syntactic relation at their base-generated positions. Thus, unaccusative subjects, which originate as internal arguments, readily license VP-internal FNMs, but unergative subjects, which are base-generated external arguments, often fail to license FNMs. However, the licensing of VP-internal FNMs also seems to depend on the type of event denoted by a given sentence, since unergative subjects can license VP-internal FNMs if the sentence denotes a telic event. In this paper, we confirm that the licensing of FNMs is subject to syntactic locality. In addition to the syntactic factors, the licensing of FNMs is sensitive to (i) the derivational complexity of the sentence and (ii) the lexical semantics of the modifiers themselves. When locality and the two additional factors are in harmony, sentences are perfectly acceptable, but when the factors pull in different directions, this leads to graded judgments and speaker variation. The main evidence for this claim comes from the results of two formal acceptability judgment experiments with a set of nominal modifiers such as nani-ka 'something' and dare-ka 'someone' (existential indeterminate pronouns). The results of these experiments show that the licensing of such expressions, just like the licensing of VP-internal FNQs, is affected by the derivational complexity of the sentence. However, existential indeterminate pronouns and FNQs respond to different lexical-semantic factors: the former are sensitive to the animacy of the host NPs, whereas FNQs are sensitive to the event type semantics.Linguistic

The typology of the distribution of Edge: the propensity for bipositionality

We discuss the grammatical conditions that can be imposed between segmental content (features) and syllable structure (positions) and how a representational preference can influence diachronic development. The discussion centers on the co-distribution of two properties: occlusivity and bipositionality. The first is the phonological feature that induces occlusivity and reduces amplitude (that is: |ʔ|, which we will refer to as Edge(*)), the second is the autosegmental structural property of belonging to multiple positions (which we refer to as ‘C.C’). Edge(*) and bipositionality have a universal affinity but they are not reducible to each other. Instead, the inherent diachronic tendency to preserve Edge(*) in bipositional structures can become grammaticalised through licensing conditions that dictate the alignment of the two properties. This can be expressed bidirectionally, forming two major language types. Type A has the condition stated from the featural perspective (Edge(*) must be found in C.C). While, Type B comes from the other direction (C.C must contain Edge(*)). Crucially, the same structure is diachronically stable: (Edge(*)-C.C). What varies is the distribution of those properties elsewhere (given the direction of licensing condition). Type A excludes Edge(*) from {#__,V_V}, while Type B excludes C.Cs without Edge(*). Although there is variation on this point, there is a UG component, because there are no anti-Type A/B languages where Edge(*) repels bipositionality

Neg-raising and Aspect: Evidence from Mandarin

Two canonical negatives in Mandarin, mei and bu, display an asymmetry with respect to the presence of neg-raising inferences. In particular, mei prefers non-neg-raising readings, while bu, unless attaching to a functional category, is forced to be interpreted as neg-raising. This paper aims to explore an approach to address this asymmetry based on interactions between negation and aspect in both syntax and semantics. I argue that the asymmetry between mei and bu is resulted from their syntactic positions relative to aspect, and their licensing conditions especially selections of event variable binders

Licensing saturation: co-occurrence restrictions in structure

Phonological co-occurrence restrictions as seen in Bantu Meinhof?s Law raise interesting questions for the nature of phonological domains and in particular, what restrictions apply in the definition of such phonological domains. Government Phonology is one framework that has gone some way in defining the boundaries of phonological domains by utilising the notion of licensing. A phonological domain thus has the formal definition under the licensing principle of Kaye [29] given in (1). (1) Licensing Principle: all positions within a phonological domain are licensed save one, the head. This paper will focus on Meinhof?s Law (ML) which has been described both as a voicing dissimilation (Meinhof [40]) and (nasal) assimilation (Herbert [21], Katamba and Hyman [28]) process. It is akin in nature to Japanese Rendaku (It� and Mester [25]) where the initial consonant in the second element of a compound is voiced, but this voicing is barred if another voiced segment is already present in the phonological domain. Whereas there is no restriction on the adjacency of the segments involved in Rendaku some notion of adjacency is called for in ML where only obstruents in a sequence of nasal+consonant clusters (henceforth NC?s or NC clusters) are affected by the rule. In its most general form, ML can be characterised as a process that disallows a sequence of two voiced obstruents within NC clusters, i.e. *NCvNC where both C?s are voiced. The goal of looking at ML in this paper is to more generally gain insights into the nature of phonological domains and to investigate whether, under the auspices of Government Phonology, we can relate the failure to sustain two voiced segments in ML, to a failure of licensing in a general way. For this purpose I will first present a characterisation of ML in Bantu and thereafter see what these data demand of the principle in (1), and the ramifications this has for licensing as a principle defining phonological domains in Government Phonology