Credibility and Credulity: How Beliefs about Beliefs Affect Entry Incentives

In this note we investigate the infringement (entry) decision for a firm facing an incumbent patent holder with uncertain patent rights. The entrant risks a dispute by entering, resulting in either a settlement (licensing) or litigation and trial. Using the litigation model described by Priest and Klein, we investigate the expected dispute resolution and its impacts on the entrant's pre-dispute behavior. The primary contribution is to show that the entrant's expectations about the patent holder's beliefs about patent enforceability are a driving factor behind the entry decision. We develop a simple taxonomy of entrant and incumbent types to explain the entry decision.

Study Skills for Online Learning

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Rationing medical education

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of rationing in medical education.Medical education is expensive and there is a limit to that which governments, funders or individuals can spend on it. Rationing involves the allocation of resources that are limited.This paper discussed the pros and cons of the application of rationing to medical education and the different forms of rationing that could be applied.Even though some stakeholders in medical education might be taken aback at the prospect of rationing, the truth is that rationing has always occurred in one form or another in medical education and in healthcare more broadly.Different types of rationing exist in healthcare professional education. For example rationing may be implicit or explicit or may be based on macro allocation or micro-allocation decisions. Funding can be distributed equally among learners, or according to the needs of individual learners, or to ensure that overall usefulness is maximised.One final option is to allow the market to operate freely and to decide in that way. These principles of rationing can apply to individual learners or to institutions or departments or learning modes.Rationing is occurring in medical education, even though it might be implicit. It is worth giving consideration to methods of rationing and to make thinking about rationing more explicit.Keywords: Medical education, cost, rationin

The future of postgraduate training

Improvements to postgraduate training have included newly designed postgraduate curricula, new forms of delivery of learning, more valid and reliable assessments, and more rigorous evaluation of training programmes. All these changes have been necessary and have now started to settle in. Now therefore is an appropriate time to look to the future of postgraduate training. Predicting the future is difficult in any course of life-however an examination of recent trends is often a good place to start. In this regard the recent trend to start to produce more doctors and healthcare professionals of the type that the population needs is likely to continue for some time to come. Medical education will also need to be more flexible in the future. The more flexible that training programmes are, the more likely that we will have experts that are sufficiently flexible to meet a range of different challenges throughout the rest of their careers. Medical education will also become more seamless in the future (at present there are probably too many major milestones and transitions in medical education). In the future educators will make much more use of technology enhanced learning, e-learning and simulation in postgraduate medical education. There will also be more pressure on postgraduate training programmes to offer value for money and to be able to demonstrate such value for money. Postgraduate medical education of the future will also be a more personalised and adaptive experience. It will be far more based on learners' individual needs and will be more responsive to those needs. Lastly postgraduate education will be much more closely supervised than it has been in the past. A common theme running through these changes will be patient centredness. This will mean safer training programmes that produce the type of doctors that patients and populations need

Identifying rent pressures [on housing market] in your neighbourhood: a new model of Irish regional rent indicators. ESRI WP567, June 2017

Since 2013, researchers in the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) have compiled a hedonic rental index for the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB). The indicator estimates a standardised rental index on a national, Dublin and outside of Dublin basis based on the 950,000 rental properties registered with the RTB. The provision in late 2016 of detailed geographical identifiers has enabled an alternative series of indicators to be estimated. In particular, hedonic rental indicators for 137 local electoral areas (LEAs) are now available on a quarterly basis from 2007 quarter 3 to 2016 quarter 4. By providing a more accurate assessment of regional trends in rental supply and demand, the indicators should enable a more precise implementation of policies in the rental market. They should also serve as a proxy for measuring underlying economic activity in these regions on an ongoing basis

Bargaining in the shadow of precedent: the surprising irrelevance of asymmetric stakes

We develop a model of bargaining and litigation in the context of patent licensing (or any contractual setting). Following Priest and Klein (1984) we developed a model that explicitly allows for (1) multiple parties (leading to asymmetry of stakes), (2) binding precedent, and (3) pre-dispute bargaining done in the “shadow” of precedent-setting courts. The pre-dispute bargaining creates an endogenous opportunity cost of litigation for both plaintiff and defendant; i.e., the harm is endogenous. We show that the effects of asymmetric stakes on the litigation rate and plaintiff win rate are offset by opportunity costs (forgone licensing). That is, the degree of asymmetry does not appear to substantially impact the rate of litigation or the observed win rate of plaintiffs at trial. This result is in stark contrast to the previous theoretical literature, and has implications for interpreting the empirical literature.

Policy analysis using DSGE models: an introduction

Many central banks have come to rely on dynamic stochastic general equilibrium, or DSGE, models to inform their economic outlook and to help formulate their policy strategies. But while their use is familiar to policymakers and academics, these models are typically not well known outside these circles. This article introduces the basic structure, logic, and application of the DSGE framework to a broader public by providing an example of its use in monetary policy analysis. The authors present and estimate a simple New Keynesian DSGE model, highlighting the core features that this basic specification shares with more elaborate versions. They then apply the estimated model to study the sources of the sudden increase in inflation that occurred in the first half of 2004. One important lesson derived from this exercise is that the management of expectations can be a more effective tool for stabilizing inflation than actual movements in the policy rate. This result is consistent with the increasing focus on the pronouncements of central bankers regarding their future actions.Econometric models ; Stochastic analysis ; Keynesian economics ; Inflation (Finance) ; Monetary policy ; Banks and banking, Central