Canada has a long history of investing in agricultural research, with public funds playing a dominant role for most crops up until recently. With the advent of biotechnology in the 1980s, the research industry underwent significant transformations. Crops more amenable to the application of DNA modification techniques (e.g., canola) gained considerable attention by the private sector and experienced an influx of private R&D investment and proliferation of intellectual property rights (IPRs). IPRs have changed the nature of knowledge from being non-excludable to being excludable, thus affecting the nature of research benefits and research incentives. The advantages and disadvantages of a stronger IPR system in Canadian agriculture are currently hotly debated in policy circles. <p> This thesis develops a theoretical model that describes the incentives for innovation and the distribution of benefits from research when such innovations are protected by Plant Breeders' Rights (PBRs) versus patents. Specifically, the research industry is modeled as a monopolistic seed company undertaking research, developing a new variety and selling it to heterogeneous farmers. The difference between PBRs and patents is embodied in the farmers' decision that incorporates the possibility of seed saving envisioned by PBRs, but not by patents. The simulation results show that under certain conditions PBRs can be as effective as patents in encouraging R&D activity, and that the share of farmers in total benefits is generally smaller under patents than under PBRs. The benefits under patenting regime, however, are not necessarily smaller in absolute terms. <P>This dissertation also develops a game theoretic model to study the impact of IPRs on the sharing of research inputs. The results reveal that when two private firms compete in a differentiated product market, they will have an incentive to protect their technologies and maintain exclusive rights. Therefore, sharing within private industry may be a challenge. As IPRs proliferate, however, a lack of incentive to share/cross-license may not be confined to private industry. IPRs may also impact the propensity of public researchers to protect or share their technologies. <P>To address the issue of sharing and assess the efficiency of the current IP protection system in the Canadian plant breeding industry, interviews with wheat and canola breeders were conducted. The responses suggest that, in general, patents have become more prevalent in both industries over the last decade, which has, in turn, reduced germplasm and information flows and increased secrecy. There is also evidence that patents undermine R&D efforts in some potentially promising areas of research and make freedom to operate in the breeding industry a concern.

Canada has a long history of investing in agricultural research, with public funds playing a dominant role for most crops up until recently. With the advent of biotechnology in the 1980s, the research industry underwent significant transformations. Crops more amenable to the application of DNA modification techniques (e.g., canola) gained considerable attention by the private sector and experienced an influx of private R&D investment and proliferation of intellectual property rights (IPRs). IPRs have changed the nature of knowledge from being non-excludable to being excludable, thus affecting the nature of research benefits and research incentives. The advantages and disadvantages of a stronger IPR system in Canadian agriculture are currently hotly debated in policy circles. <p> This thesis develops a theoretical model that describes the incentives for innovation and the distribution of benefits from research when such innovations are protected by Plant Breeders' Rights (PBRs) versus patents. Specifically, the research industry is modeled as a monopolistic seed company undertaking research, developing a new variety and selling it to heterogeneous farmers. The difference between PBRs and patents is embodied in the farmers' decision that incorporates the possibility of seed saving envisioned by PBRs, but not by patents. The simulation results show that under certain conditions PBRs can be as effective as patents in encouraging R&D activity, and that the share of farmers in total benefits is generally smaller under patents than under PBRs. The benefits under patenting regime, however, are not necessarily smaller in absolute terms. <P>This dissertation also develops a game theoretic model to study the impact of IPRs on the sharing of research inputs. The results reveal that when two private firms compete in a differentiated product market, they will have an incentive to protect their technologies and maintain exclusive rights. Therefore, sharing within private industry may be a challenge. As IPRs proliferate, however, a lack of incentive to share/cross-license may not be confined to private industry. IPRs may also impact the propensity of public researchers to protect or share their technologies. <P>To address the issue of sharing and assess the efficiency of the current IP protection system in the Canadian plant breeding industry, interviews with wheat and canola breeders were conducted. The responses suggest that, in general, patents have become more prevalent in both industries over the last decade, which has, in turn, reduced germplasm and information flows and increased secrecy. There is also evidence that patents undermine R&D efforts in some potentially promising areas of research and make freedom to operate in the breeding industry a concern.

This dissertation consists of three essays evaluating topics in industrial organization. The first essay investigates a market structure or property regime in which a final good exists only by assembling multiple, monopoly-supplied components. In such dynamic settings, any sunk cost results in an outcome of hold-up, also known as tragedy of the anticommons. I design a model showing conditions for which two factors that reduce sunk cost, refunds and complementarities, mitigate hold-up. If the first component purchased has positive stand alone value or the first seller offers a full refund, hold-up is mitigated. My results suggest several policies that can mitigate inefficient outcomes in assembly problems, including legal requirements on full refunds, regulation on the purchasing order of components, and prohibition of price discrimination. The second essay applies Bayesian statistics to single-firm event studies used in securities litigation and antitrust investigations. Inference based on Bayesian analysis does not require an assumption of normality that potentially invalidates standard inference of classical single-firm event studies. I investigate ten events, five from actual securities litigation cases. Various Bayesian models, including replication of the frequentist approach, are examined. A flexible Bayesian model, replacing parametric likelihood functions with the empirical distribution function, also is explored. Our approach suggests an alternative, valid method for inference with easy implementation and interpretation. The third essay, motivated in the context of pharmaceutical advertising, analyzes demand rotations caused by an exogenously determined advertising parameter under Cournot oligopoly competition. We find that firms and consumers prefer extreme levels of advertising, but preferences for which extreme do not necessarily align. However, these differences can be alleviated with few or many firms in the market or cheap or expensive technologies. Therefore, advertising levels, regulated or not, might not serve consumers' best interests unless certain market attributes hold.

This research focuses upon cases wherein post]disaster housing assistance was affected by tenure insecurity. In the case of post]Katrina New Orleans, the Road Home, which provided monies for rebuilding, faced difficulties in allocating its aid because of heirship titles, a form of tenure insecurity to which the United States has often been misconceived as immune. In the case of post]Hurricane Mitch in Tegucigalpa, a post]disaster housing relocation program struggled to find lands in an urban land market with pervasive insecurity

<p>The development of software was considered until the beginning of the 1990th as a cathedral like product development in closed companies. This way of development changed in the last decade. Open source software (OSS) development challenged this consideration significantly. OSS is produced in co-operation by skilled people, distributed and used by many moral agents. The result, the software itself, can be studied and modified. Herein is the main incentive for people to develop the software. In such a mode of production the freedom to access knowledge and information (=source code) is a necessity to produce the artifact (software).</p><p>Software is a digital entity. The main difference in comparison to natural resources like oil, land, minerals is that it can be used and reproduced without losses. It lacks the capacity of getting naturally scarce. Contemporary intellectual property rights assume implicitly that goods might getting scarce one day. Imbedded in the term intellectual property is also an idea of "fencing" objects. In this thesis I will argue that anartificial"encing"of digital objects might cause unintentional bad consequences for the society. An other quality intellectual property rights are claimed to have is that they serve as an incentive for inventors/authors to produce new inventions and ideas. The practice of OSS development works without such an incentive provided by intellectual property rights.</p><p>The moral conflict, which I attempt to unravel in this work deals with the question to what extend the application of intellectual property rights in software is necessary and how restrictive particular property rights in digital objects should be - if there should be any at all. Knowledge as the factor of production is of the same value in knowledge societies as land was for agrarian societies. The difference is in the mode of production and the un-limitless availability of digitalized knowledge. I argue that the"protection"of knowledge, and software is knowledge, has to be carefully revised in so called knowledge societies.</p>

The Canadian canola breeding sector met a transition from publicly funded breeding research to large private investments in research and development (R&D). The increasing use of biotechnology tools in the mid 1990s made the assignment of plant ownership technically possible while the legislative safeguards that were put in place during the same period enabled owners to take juristic actions against potential infringers. Today, canola breeding sector is dominated by large multinational firms. The generation of proprietary knowledge in the canola breeding sector has caused a freedom to operate issue. Private and public firms conducting canola R&D are seriously concerned about their ability to gain and preserve access to key technologies in an IPR world. <p>This thesis uses the tragedy of the anticommons framework to analyze the consequences of increased intellectual property protection in the canola breeding sector. Theory suggests that when a common resource is owned by multiple owners, each of the owners has the incentive to overcharge potential users, leading to the underuse of the resource. In R&D, different owners of complementary technologies may overcharge potential R&D firms that want to assemble different technological pieces to produce a new one. The result is forgoing research and development of new products.<p>The results of personal interviews with thirteen canola researchers and IP officers are presented and analyzed. The results suggest that the increase in the intellectual property protection in the last two decades in the canola breeding sector has led to difficulties with canola R&D. These difficulties take the form of reduced access to current, proprietary and public material. With hampered access to research input material, research output is not maximized and potential research may be forgone. Interviewees described how the increase in the intellectual property protection affects their personal and organizations ability to conduct research as well as some the implications of the new IP regime on the canola breeding sector. There is indication that canola breeding sector is moving towards a super-protectionism. Under these conditions, canola R&D firms, private and public, are in search for ways that will open access to enabling technologies and research areas. The creation of platform technologies and collaborations are the most prominent ones and are observed to increase in occurrence world wide.

The development of software was considered until the beginning of the 1990th as a cathedral like product development in closed companies. This way of development changed in the last decade. Open source software (OSS) development challenged this consideration significantly. OSS is produced in co-operation by skilled people, distributed and used by many moral agents. The result, the software itself, can be studied and modified. Herein is the main incentive for people to develop the software. In such a mode of production the freedom to access knowledge and information (=source code) is a necessity to produce the artifact (software). Software is a digital entity. The main difference in comparison to natural resources like oil, land, minerals is that it can be used and reproduced without losses. It lacks the capacity of getting naturally scarce. Contemporary intellectual property rights assume implicitly that goods might getting scarce one day. Imbedded in the term intellectual property is also an idea of "fencing" objects. In this thesis I will argue that anartificial"encing"of digital objects might cause unintentional bad consequences for the society. An other quality intellectual property rights are claimed to have is that they serve as an incentive for inventors/authors to produce new inventions and ideas. The practice of OSS development works without such an incentive provided by intellectual property rights. The moral conflict, which I attempt to unravel in this work deals with the question to what extend the application of intellectual property rights in software is necessary and how restrictive particular property rights in digital objects should be - if there should be any at all. Knowledge as the factor of production is of the same value in knowledge societies as land was for agrarian societies. The difference is in the mode of production and the un-limitless availability of digitalized knowledge. I argue that the"protection"of knowledge, and software is knowledge, has to be carefully revised in so called knowledge societies.

The Canadian canola breeding sector met a transition from publicly funded breeding research to large private investments in research and development (R&D). The increasing use of biotechnology tools in the mid 1990s made the assignment of plant ownership technically possible while the legislative safeguards that were put in place during the same period enabled owners to take juristic actions against potential infringers. Today, canola breeding sector is dominated by large multinational firms. The generation of proprietary knowledge in the canola breeding sector has caused a freedom to operate issue. Private and public firms conducting canola R&D are seriously concerned about their ability to gain and preserve access to key technologies in an IPR world. <p>This thesis uses the tragedy of the anticommons framework to analyze the consequences of increased intellectual property protection in the canola breeding sector. Theory suggests that when a common resource is owned by multiple owners, each of the owners has the incentive to overcharge potential users, leading to the underuse of the resource. In R&D, different owners of complementary technologies may overcharge potential R&D firms that want to assemble different technological pieces to produce a new one. The result is forgoing research and development of new products.<p>The results of personal interviews with thirteen canola researchers and IP officers are presented and analyzed. The results suggest that the increase in the intellectual property protection in the last two decades in the canola breeding sector has led to difficulties with canola R&D. These difficulties take the form of reduced access to current, proprietary and public material. With hampered access to research input material, research output is not maximized and potential research may be forgone. Interviewees described how the increase in the intellectual property protection affects their personal and organizations ability to conduct research as well as some the implications of the new IP regime on the canola breeding sector. There is indication that canola breeding sector is moving towards a super-protectionism. Under these conditions, canola R&D firms, private and public, are in search for ways that will open access to enabling technologies and research areas. The creation of platform technologies and collaborations are the most prominent ones and are observed to increase in occurrence world wide.

Property involves the possibility for men tocontrol their surroundings. Part of this control involves  the  exclusion of others from the benefits produced by their controlled goods.The possibility to exclude or not to excludeothers allows or prevents an efficient use of goods. So the tragedy of the commons ariseswhen there are no rights of exclusion; and the tragedy of anticommons, where there is anexcess of exclusion rights.In this article, the author makes a complete analysis of the tragedy of commons and anticommons, in relation with property rights, pointing out the differences and similarities between both of them, their presence in everyday life and their relevance in our legal system. / La propiedad nace con la posibilidad del hombre de controlar aquello que lo rodea. Parte de este control implica la exclusión de los demásrespecto de los provechos que se obtienen delbien controlado. La posibilidad o no de excluira los demás permite o impide un uso eficientede los bienes. Así surge la tragedia de comu-nes cuando no existen derechos de exclusión;y la tragedia de anticomunes, cuando hay unexceso de derechos de exclusión.En el presente artículo, el autor realiza un completo análisis de la tragedia de comunes y anticomunes en relación al derecho de propiedad, indicando las diferencias y semejanzas entre ambas, su presencia en la vida diaria, y su relevancia en nuestro ordenamiento jurídico.

L'application de la théorie du droit des brevets à l'innovation en biotechnologies humaines révèle certaines fragilités et pose de nombreux problèmes, au regard des composantes techniques et éthiques de sa protection Juridique. Au plan technique, la condition d'une invention en particulier, longtemps laissée de côté par la doctrine et par la jurisprudence, se trouve rappelée aux États-Unis, dans le secteur des biotechnologies humaines, comme une condition essentielle. Au plan éthique, les biotechnologies humaines, porteuses d'immenses espoirs. suscitent en même temps qu'une fascination certaine, la crainte de dérives qui échapperaient au contrôle des institutions compétentes. Les exclusions éthiques à la brevetabilité sont un moyen de les appréhender. A la lumière d'une approche comparative entre le droit européen et le droit américain, à titre principal, faisant état du droit français à titre d'illustration du droit européen, la, réflexion dans ce travail porte sur les limites des exceptions et des exclusions, techniques et éthiques, à la brevetabilité des inventions en biotechnologies humaines, et formule quelques pistes de réflexion. Face à la menace de blocages de la recherche par l'effet des brevets en biotechnologies humaines, largement alléguée dans ce champ de recherche, certains partent à la conquête de modèles alternatifs de gestion collective de l'innovation. La théorie économique des communs, dont la transposition à la sphère juridique concernée par les ressources immatérielles, se révèle, à cet égard, particulièrement prometteuse à la lumière des biotechnologies humaines et peut permettre d'unifier juridiquement ce foisonnement d'initiatives. / Applying the patent law theory to innovation in the field of human biotechnology highlights weaknesses and raises multiple issues related to the technical and ethical elements of its legal protection. In terms of technique, a recent change in United States Law is shedding light on the condition of invention, now considered an essential condition, after being long disregarded by doctrine and case law. In terms of ethics, though fascinating and raising high hopes and great expectations. human biotechnology concurrently gives rise to the fear of possible drifts that might elude the control of competent institutions. Ethical exclusions from patentability are one solution to ward them off. Comparing American and European law, illustrated by a reference to French law, this study focuses on the limitations of technical and ethical exceptions and exclusions from the patentability of human biotechnology inventions and suggests some further lines of thought. Facing the threat of possible research deadlocks induced by human biotechnology patents, largely invoked in this research field, alternative models of collective innovation management are. being sought. Transposed to the legal sphere delving into the issue of immaterial resources, the economic theory of the Commons applied to human biotechnology appears as highly promising and could result in a legal unification of this profusion of initiatives.