Technology licensing in mixed oligopoly

Abstract

We develop a mixed oligopoly model with one public firm and two private firms to explore the licensing strategy considered by the innovated private firm. The major findings of our paper are that: firstly, if the patentee licenses the public firm under some plausible parametric range, the public firm will not accept the technology licensing offer from the private firm; secondly, if the public firm accepts the licensing, all of the three different types of licensing contracts (royalty, fixed-fee and two-part tariff) can be the same optimal licensing contracts; thirdly, if the patentee licenses to another private firm, fixed-fee licensing will be the optimal choice for the patentee; finally, licensing to the public firm and another private firm simultaneously is not the best strategy for the patentee when the original cost difference between public and private firms is large. Our results are quite different from the previous on the licensing strategy among private firms.