Contracting for technology transfer: patent licensing and know-how in Brazil

Abstract

Using contract level data, we study the relation between the inclusion of know-how in cross-border patent licensing agreements and the contractual terms used by firms to deal with moral hazard risks. We use official data on international technology contracts with patent licensing terms registered by affiliated and unaffiliated parties before the Department of Technology Transfer of the National Institute of Intellectual Property (INPI) in Brazil between 1996 and 2012. We find that contracts between unaffiliated parties involving know-how transfer show distinctive contractual and technology features compared to the rest: (i) they involve younger but lower quality technologies (compared to contracts without know-how); (ii) they are more prone to up front lumpsum payments than royalty or combined payments (royalty and fixed); and (iii) they are more likely to be accompanied by the licensing of other IPRs, in addition to patents, such as trademarks.

Exploring the Factors Triggering Occupational Ethics Risk of Technology Transaction in Chinese Construction Industry

“…Therefore, in the process of technology promotion, consultation, and training, the technology exporter may have occupational ethics risk behavior to safeguard their own interests. For a technology importer, under the information asymmetry situation, when the exporter is unable to inspect the local industrialization of imported technology, brand maintenance, marketing promotion of the actual efforts of technology importers, technology importers are also prone to occupational ethics risk behavior [22].…”

“…Factors that leading to the occupational ethics risk of technical transaction are closely related to the characteristics of the field, for example, seek quick success and instant benefits [35,36], opportunistic psychology [18,30,31,37], asymmetry of information [28,31], poor supervision and punishment [38][39][40], poor absorption capacity of the technology importer [41], great difference in cooperation objectives and expectations of the parties [33,42], poor technical competition intelligence capacity of enterprises [43,44], high uncertainty in technology research and development [3,45], fierce market competition [14,39,46], high cost of know-how [1,22,27], and unreasonable incentive mechanism of technology transaction [47,48].…”

“…In fact, the most important purpose of the technology exporter to the technology transaction is to obtain maximum profit, the way and level of the technology transaction is completely considered from their own interests. Previous research on technology transaction has mainly focused on the incentive mechanism and price clause design in technology transaction contract [22,24,26,55]. It can be seen that the rationality of incentive mechanism in technology transaction contract clause has a great impact on occupational ethics risk.…”

Manufacturing strategy, organizational slack, and the formation of interfirm linkages

“…It is reasonable to use individual contracts as our unit of analysis because we are interested in understanding whether a firm's manufacturing strategy is a potential factor that affects the firm's selection of type of interfirm linkage in each contract and our independent variable and some of the control variables are included on the firm and dyadic levels. In addition, contract-level data are commonly used in previous studies (Martinez and Zuniga, 2017).…”

Sustainable Technology Innovation Path Recognition: An Evaluation of Patent Risk of International Trade

“…Therefore, it is difficult for the existing international patent system to ensure identical standards of patent protection for every region. This dilemma is defined as patent risk in this study, which can be regarded as the negative consequences related to the protection, transferring, and licensing of technology in international trade [1]. The major reasons for patent risk are multi-aspect and complex, with the legal system, policy environment, and market competition all with the possibility to trigger the situation.…”