Licensing by a monopolist and unionized labor market

Abstract

We show that a monopolist final goods producer may find it profitable to create competition by licensing its technology if the input market is imperfectly competitive. With a centralized union, we show that licensing by a monopolist is profitable under both uniform and discriminatory wage settings by the union. However, the incentive for licensing is higher under the former situation. We also show that licensing by the monopolist is profitable under both quantity and price competition, and the incentive for licensing is higher under price competition than under quantity competition. Our qualitative results hold even with decentralized unions. --Licensing,Labor union,Price competition,Quantity competition