LSN: Law & Economics: Private Law (Topic)最新文献

{"title":"The Canada Trademarks Dataset","authors":"Jeremy N. Sheff","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3782655","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3782655","url":null,"abstract":"This article discloses and describes a new research dataset representing the Canadian Intellectual Property Office’s historical archive of trademark applications. This individual-application-level dataset includes all applications since approximately 1980, and many preserved applications and registrations dating back to the beginning of Canada’s trademark registry in 1865, totaling over 1.6 million application records. It includes comprehensive bibliographic and lifecycle data; trademark characteristics; goods and services claims; identification of applicants, attorneys, and other interested parties (including address data); detailed prosecution history event data; and data on application, registration, and use claims in countries other than Canada. Both the dataset and the code used to build and analyze it are presented for public use on open-access terms. This article uses the dataset to generate novel descriptive analyses of the performance of Canada’s trademark registration system and the behavior of applicants for registration, both independently and in comparison to the United States and Australia. These analyses suggest that Canada’s trademark registration system is substantially underperforming other nations with respect to efficiency of examination, and that recent statutory and regulatory changes in Canadian trademark law may have the effect of masking or even exacerbating this underperformance while decreasing the reliability of the Canadian trademark registry as an authoritative guide to trademarks used in Canadian commerce. <br><br>The dataset repository is available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4999655","PeriodicalId":162065,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Law & Economics: Private Law (Topic)","volume":"117 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123054881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Unrequested Benefits, Damages Assessment, and Information Acquisition","authors":"Zhiyong (John) Liu, R. Avraham, Yue Qiao","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3776687","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3776687","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 We investigate the interaction between the law’s prohibition of recovery for unrequested benefits (but provision of damages for unrequested harms) imposed on third parties, and parties’ incentives at the ex ante stage to acquire information about the harms or benefits of the activities they consider engaging in. We analyze the impact of these interactions on the efficiency ranking of two prevalent damages regimes: ex ante damages and ex post damages. We show that ex post damages induce information acquisition, thus potentially leading to more efficient decision-making. However, under an ex post regime, the existence of, and the prohibition of recovery for, unrequested benefits distort parties’ incentives to acquire information and engage in the activity. Taking into account the tradeoff between these effects, we show that the relative efficiency of ex ante versus ex post damages depends on the size of potential unrequested benefits, and how the ex ante damages are calculated by courts, specifically, whether they are truncated or not. The larger the potential unrequested benefits, the more likely nontruncated ex ante damages outperform ex post damages. In contrast, ex post damages are always more efficient than truncated ex ante damages.","PeriodicalId":162065,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Law & Economics: Private Law (Topic)","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115716701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Revision of the Canadian Copyright Act: An Economic Analysis","authors":"M. Boyer","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3753010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3753010","url":null,"abstract":"A clause of the 2012 Canadian Copyright Modernization Act requires Parliament to review the Copyright Act every five years. The House of Commons instructed two of its committees, the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology (INDU) and the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage (SCCH), to review the Copyright Act. The committees filed their reports in 2019. Four of their recommendations are particularly relevant and discussed here: the extension of the term of copyright, the introduction of a so-called “termination right”, an amendment of the copyright reversion regime, and the introduction of a mandatory registration. My study is intended to inform policy analysis of these recommendations, including, among other things, the upfront impact on creator bargaining power and remuneration; the long-term impact on a work’s availability and potential revenues; the creative marketplace in general; and the interactions between the proposed legislative amendments and other areas of the Copyright Act.","PeriodicalId":162065,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Law & Economics: Private Law (Topic)","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128102663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Liability Rules and Prevention for Risky and Ambiguous Activities: Theory and Experimental Evidence","authors":"Kene Boun My, Nicolas Lampach, S. Spaeter","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3750651","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3750651","url":null,"abstract":"We develop a formal model to compare the incentive effect of strict liability rules in a risky and ambiguous environment. The firm's business activity entails a risk of technological disaster, which likelihood is a decreasing function of prevention. To assess our theoretical predictions, we design a lab experiment by varying the legal regime and the environment. Consonant with our theory, we obtain that limited liability stimulates subjects' investment in prevention in comparison to unlimited liability when only risk matters. Besides, subjects opt for more prevention under the regime of unlimited liability when shifting from risk to ambiguity. Nevertheless, this last theoretical finding is not observed with limited liability. Empirical results from panel fixed effect regressions confirm the treatment effects. We also collect some additional characteristics about the subjects' social preferences during the experiment.","PeriodicalId":162065,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Law & Economics: Private Law (Topic)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123770801","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Valuing Unpaid Care Work in Bhutan","authors":"C. Dorji, Valerie Mercer-Blackman, A. Hampel-Milagrosa, Jooyeoun Suh","doi":"10.22617/wps200065-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22617/wps200065-2","url":null,"abstract":"A growing body of scholarly literature has attempted to measure and value unpaid care work in various countries, but perhaps only the government statistical agencies in the United States and the United Kingdom have seriously undertaken periodic and systematic measures of the time spent on unpaid work at the national level, and partially incorporated those values into their gross domestic product(GDP). One country that has been ahead of its time on aspects of societal welfare measurement is Bhutan, which produces the Gross National Happiness (GNH) Index. However, until the first GNH Survey, in 2008, Bhutan did not have any sense of the size and distribution of unpaid work, despite its strong societal norms about the value of volunteering and community work. This paper is the first to estimate the value of unpaid care work in Bhutan. It shows the pros and cons of various approaches and their equivalent measures of unpaid care work as a share of GDP. As with similar studies on the topic, this paper also finds that women spend more than twice as much time as men performing unpaid care work, regardless of their income, age, residency, or number of people in the household. The paper also provides recommendations for improving the measurement of unpaid care work in Bhutan.","PeriodicalId":162065,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Law & Economics: Private Law (Topic)","volume":"67 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130607109","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Regulatory Partitioning as a Key Function of Corporate Personality","authors":"M. Pargendler","doi":"10.4337/9781789902914.00023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4337/9781789902914.00023","url":null,"abstract":"Corporate personality entails the separation between the legal spheres of the entity and its shareholders. This chapter highlights the critical economic role of what I call regulatory partitioning, which is the distinction between the entity and its members for purposes of the imputation of legal rights and duties. By enabling the corporation to operate as a “nexus for regulation,” regulatory partitioning produces significant benefits as well as costs. While regulatory partitioning is essential to the proper functioning of multi-member firms, it also supports legal arbitrage in tax and regulatory matters as a major driving force of incorporations around the world. The chapter also distinguishes between the frequently invoked notion of veil piercing as an exception to asset partitioning and a much more pervasive process I call veil peeking as an exception to regulatory partitioning.","PeriodicalId":162065,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Law & Economics: Private Law (Topic)","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132560249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Deterioration of Appropriate Remedies in Patent Disputes","authors":"Dirk Auer, Geoffrey A. Manne, Julian Morris, Kristian Stout","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3707573","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3707573","url":null,"abstract":"Property rights are an essential economic institution. As the great UCLA economist Harold Demsetz famously argued, property rights spur specialization, investment, and competition, which in turn increase productivity, innovation, and wealth throughout the economy.<br><br>The same holds true for intellectual property rights, including patents, which are no less important than their traditional counterparts in facilitating innovation and the efficient organization of productive economic activity, particularly in the modern, high-tech economy. A wealth of literature indicates that much, if not most, of the value of innovation is passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices and higher quality goods and services. Indeed, as Nobel Laureate William Nordhaus finds, even in the presence of patents to facilitate the appropriability of the value of innovation by inventors, “only a miniscule fraction of the social returns from technological advances over the 1948- 2001 period was captured by producers, indicating that most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers.” Thus, although measurement problems plague such research, there is strong evidence that nations with greater levels of patent protection have historically achieved significantly higher innovative output than those with lower levels of patent protection.<br> <br>Nevertheless, a significant body of academic and policy work has argued—with very real policy success—that patent rights in the U.S. have been too strong. The past two decades have witnessed a significant weakening of patent protection in the U.S. as courts, legislators, and several private organizations have progressively chipped away at some of the key features of patent protection. This includes the availability of injunctions, the amount of damages awarded to victims of patent infringement, and other, more subtle changes, such as curbs on fee-shifting between parties to patent litigation.<br><br>Behind many of these changes lies a powerful intellectual movement, alleging that excessive patent protection is holding back western economies. These critics chiefly fear that the owners of the standard essential patents (“SEPs”) crucial to much of modern technology are charging their commercial partners too much for the rights to use their patents—referred to as patent holdup and royalty stacking—and that so-called patent trolls (“patent-assertion entities” or “PAEs”) are deterring innovation by small startups by employing “extortionate” litigation tactics. Oversimplifying, the argument is that, by selecting certain winning technologies, standardization artificially weakens implementers’ bargaining position vis à vis patent holders. Accordingly, critics argue that the royalties charged by SEP holders should not exceed those that they could have obtained before their technology was included in a standard. However, there is little evidence beyond occasional anecdotes to support t","PeriodicalId":162065,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Law & Economics: Private Law (Topic)","volume":"108 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132943046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Exclusionary Contracts and Incentives to Innovate","authors":"Simen A. Ulsaker","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3586414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3586414","url":null,"abstract":"The article considers a situation where several firms have the opportunity to sell an identical product to a set of buyers, and where each seller can invest in R&D to develop a higher quality version of the product in question. I consider the possibility of allowing the sellers to offer exclusionary contracts, prior to deciding how much to invest in R&D. In equilibrium every buyer will sign an exclusionary contract with the same seller. Since all buyers are locked to one seller, only this seller will have an incentive to invest in R&D. Whether or not banning exclusionary contracts increases the aggregate probability of successful innovation depends on the R&D technology. More specifically, banning exclusionary contracts will increase the aggregate probability of innovation and joint surplus of buyers and sellers only when the R&D technology exhibits sufficient diseconomies of scale.","PeriodicalId":162065,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Law & Economics: Private Law (Topic)","volume":"122 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116840484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Many Faces of Adverse Possession: Economic and Empirical Analyses of Laws in 156 Jurisdictions","authors":"Yun-chien Chang","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3558800","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3558800","url":null,"abstract":"Acquisitive prescription, a broader concept than adverse possession, is adopted in at least 130 jurisdictions in the world, and the doctrine dates back to Roman law. This article first surveys the wide variety of designs of acquisitive prescription in the world, and then uses economic analysis of law to further examine the merits of these various designs. Contrary to many prior works, this article argues that the most justifiable form of acquisitive prescription is a registration-based one with title and good-faith requirements — Possession, however, is redundant, even creating undesirable results. Given that boundary disputes can be left for another doctrine, possession-based acquisitive prescription, no matter whether possessors are in good faith or bad faith, can hardly be justified in economic terms in countries with well-functioning registrars, if they do not have title. Possession-based acquisitive prescription can only be justified in countries with dysfunctional registrars.","PeriodicalId":162065,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Law & Economics: Private Law (Topic)","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129181233","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Stock Market Performance of Jewish Firms During the Third Reich","authors":"J. Ihlow, J. Jackwerth","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3501557","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3501557","url":null,"abstract":"We study the effect of discrimination against Jewish managers and owners on their firms' stock during the Third Reich. The stock of firms with Jewish managers underperformed by around 5% annually, with abnormal performance persisting on average for three years until firm \"Aryanization.\" Firms with Jewish owners perform much like firms without any Jewish involvement. We identify harassment of Jewish-managed firms as the leading cause for the discount. Alternative explanations, such as brain drain and Jewish stigma, seem less relevant. We find that discriminating against a minority can have a negative effect on an entire economy.","PeriodicalId":162065,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Law & Economics: Private Law (Topic)","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129166645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}