The Problem of Patent Thickets in Convergent Technologies

Patent thickets are unintentionally dense webs of overlapping intellectual property rights owned by different companies that can retard progress. This article begins with a review of existing research on patent thickets, focusing in particular on the problem of patent thickets in nanotechnology, or nanothickets. After presenting visual evidence of the presence of nanothickets using a network analytic technique, it discusses potential organizational responses to patent thickets. It then reviews the existing research on patent pools and discusses pool formation in the shadow of antitrust enforcement. Based on recent research on patent pool formation, it examines the divergent fate of two recent pools and discusses the prospects for the future formation of nanotechnology patent pools, or nanopools.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72678/1/annals.1382.014.pd

Logit dynamics with concurrent updates for local interaction games

Game Theory is the main tool used to model the behavior of agents that are guided by their own objective in contexts where their gains depend also on the choices made by neighboring agents. Game theoretic approaches have been often proposed for modeling phenomena in a complex social network, such as the formation of the social network itself. We are interested in the dynamics that govern such phenomena. In this paper, we study a specific class of randomized update rules called the logit choice function which can be coupled with different selection rules so to give different dynamics. We study how the logit choice function behave in an extreme case of concurrency