Volume 3, No. 1, April 2004

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Optimal Licensing Strategy: Royalty or Fixed Fee?
Andrea Fosfuri
Department of Business Administration, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid,
Spain and CEPR, London, U.K
Esther Roca  
ICADE, Spain
Abstract
Licensing a cost-reducing innovation through a royalty has been shown to be superior to licensing by means of a fixed fee for an incumbent licensor. This note shows that this result relies crucially on the assumption that the incumbent licensor can sell its cost-reducing inno-vation to all industry players. If, for any reason, only some competitors could be reached through a licensing contract, then a fixed fee might be optimally chosen.
Key words: licensing contract; Cournot competition; strategic effects
JEL classification: D45

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