Set Of Economic Agents Research Articles

The State of the National Innovation System of Jordan: Key Actors Perspective

Innovation results from various interactions between a set of economic agents and enterprises, it forms a series of processes and links between industrial institutions, public agents, the university community, and research institutions to develop scientific research activities and technological development. On this basis, the study aimed to provide a better understanding of the status of the Jordanian system of innovation from key actors’ perspectives in the Jordanian system of innovation. Fifteen in-depth interviews were conducted with representatives from various subsystems of the Jordanian system of innovation. The results showed a system’s strengths and weaknesses, and Public-private interactions and networks in the system. Furthermore, it showed the main issues that must address and the most important financial and non-financial policy required instruments to stimulate innovation for Jordanian businesses.

Interacting oligopolistic and oligopsonistic Cournot markets

This paper considers the model of several interacting Cournot markets. Some of them are final goods markets, while the others are resource markets. The markets interact by sharing the same set of economic agents (producers), so that the latter are oligopsonists on resource markets and simultaneously oligopolists on goods markets. Each producer strategically chooses its supply volumes on each goods market and its purchase volume of resources in accordance with technology and expected supply effects on prices. We prove that in the case of linear demand and supply functions the model of interacting Cournot markets is reduced to a potential game; hence, the Nash equilibrium problem is equivalent to a mathematical programming problem. We also discuss the advantages and special features of such a representation of interacting oligopolistic and oligopsonistic markets.

The USPTO Trademark Assignment Dataset: Descriptions and Insights

Attention to the asset value of intellectual property (IP) has traditionally concentrated on high-value patent sales and licenses. This narrow focus neglects non-patent assets held by a broader set of economic agents, such as trademarks, and overlooks the evolving ways owners are employing and monetizing their IP assets. To help remedy this deficiency, the Office of Chief Economist of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is releasing a series of datasets in formats convenient for researchers. This paper describes the USPTO Trademark Assignment Dataset, a database of 786,931 assignments and other transactions recorded during the 1952-2013 period and affecting 4,197,645 trademark registrations or applications. Since these data have not been commonly used, we provide a comprehensive description, present key trends, and examine the rate of transaction for issued registrations. Trend analysis suggests intensifying trademark collateralization as the number of trademarks recorded as collateral to secure debt has increased in absolute terms and relative to the stock of live registrations. The number of trademarks for which an assignment was recorded has also grown, though this trend appears to be reversing in the last decade. Among the 3.4 million registrations issued during the 1978-2013 period, 31 percent were affected by some transaction over their life; 21 percent changed ownership; and 12 percent were affected by a security interest agreement. While further empirical work is needed, transaction rates by registration cohort suggest that registered trademarks may be more likely to be traded than patents. Further, we do not find a positive relationship between the incidence of trade and maintenance, suggesting that trademark assignment and maintenance outcomes may not follow the pattern observed for patents. Despite some limitations, these data open new avenues for research, particularly with respect to trademark collateralization and the market for brands.

The USPTO Trademark Assignment Dataset: Descriptions, Lessons, and Insights

Attention to the asset value of intellectual property (IP) has traditionally concentrated on high-value patent sales and licenses. This narrow focus neglects non-patent assets held by a broader set of economic agents, such as trademarks, and overlooks the evolving ways owners are employing and monetizing their intangible assets. To help remedy this deficiency, the Office of Chief Economist of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is releasing a series of datasets in formats convenient for researchers. This paper describes the USPTO Trademark Assignment Dataset, a database of over 785,000 transactions recorded during 1952-2013 affecting almost 4.2 million trademark registrations and applications. We provide a comprehensive description and present key trends, showing that among registrations issued 1978-2013, more than 31% were affected by some transaction during their lives, 21% were transferred to different parties, and 12% were involved in at least one security interest agreement. Examining transaction rates by registration cohort, we find evidence that registered US trademarks may be more likely to be traded than are US patents. Other trends and findings are discussed. Despite limitations, these data open new avenues for research, particularly with respect to trademark collateralization and the market for brands.

On the non-emptiness of the fuzzy core

The seminal contribution of Debreu and Scarf (Int Econ Rev 4:235–246, 1963) connects the two concepts of core and competitive equilibrium in exchange economies. In effect, their core-equilibrium equivalence result states that, when the set of economic agents is replicated, the set of core allocations of the replica economy shrinks to the set of competitive allocations. Florenzano (J Math Anal Appl 153:18–36, 1990) defines the fuzzy core as the set of allocations which cannot be blocked by any coalition with an arbitrary rate of participation and then shows the asymptotic limit of cores of replica economies coincides with the fuzzy core. In this note, we provide an elementary proof of the non-emptiness of the fuzzy core for an exchange economy. Hence, in motivation, our result is similar to the contribution of Vohra (On Scarf’s theorem on the non-emptiness of the core: a direct proof through Kakutani’s fixed point theorem. Brown University Working Paper, 1987) and Shapley and Vohra (Econ Theory 1:108–116, 1991) for the core. Unlike the classical Debreu–Scarf limit theorem (Debreu and Scarf in Int Econ Rev 4:235–246, 1963) and its numerous extensions our result does not require any asymptotic intersection—or limit—of the set of core allocations of replica economies.

Why There is No Such Thing Like Transaction Costs, After All

In recent decades the concept of transaction costs has been very successful in eco-nomic theorizing, yet there is still no workable approach to measurement. I demonstrate that the reason of this situation is twofold: The concept leads into an infinite regress, and under the conditions of an ideal-typical competitive economy all the transactions costs become transformation costs a la North, after all opportunities for profitable arbi-trage have been exploited (i.e. transaction cost become the transformation costs of the services needed to realize the transactions). Only in the latter case exact measurement will be possible. However, as long as individual capabilities and sets of information dif-fer across the set of economic agents, transaction costs cannot be measured, and in fact reflect a specific rent imputable to individual competitive advantages in the realiza-tion of transactions. The rent is a part of entrepreneurial profit that cannot be separated analytically. This assertion implies that one should not follow the standard approach of the New Institutional Economics which focuses on the environment and the object of transactions in order to explain, for example, the boundary between firm and market. Instead, the subject of transactions and her capabilities should be in focus, namely, the entrepreneur. Here non-economic explanations come into play in an essential way.

Preference Functions on Measure Spaces of Economic Agents

Given a set of economic agents and a set of coalitions, a non-empty family of subsets of the first set closed under the formation of countable unions and complements, an allocation is a countably additive function from the set of coalitions to the closed positive orthant of the commodity space. To describe preferences in this context, one can either introduce a positive, finite real measure defined on the set of coalitions and specify, for each agent, a relation of preference or difference on the closed positive orthant of the commodity space, or specify, for each coalition, a relation of preference or indifference on the set of allocations. This article studies the extent to which these two approaches are equivalent.