Patent package structures and sharing rules for royalty revenue

Abstract

The role of patent pools—one-stop systems that gather patents from multiple patent holders and offer them to users as a package—is gaining research attention. To bolster the scarce stream of the literature that has addressed how a patent pool agent distributes royalty revenues among patent holders, we conduct an axiomatic analysis of sharing rules for royalty revenue derived from patents managed by a patent pool agent. In our framework, the patent pool agent organizes the patents into some packages, which we call a package structure. By using the hypergraph formulation developed by van den Nouweland et al. (Int J Game Theory 20:255–268, 1992), we analyze sharing rules that consider the package structure. In our study, we propose a sharing rule and show that it is the unique rule that satisfies efficiency, fairness, and independence requirements. In addition, we analyze sharing rules that enable a patent pool agent to organize a revenue-maximizing and objection-free profile.