Trademarks and the Boundaries of the Firm

Employees and the Boundaries of the Corporation

“…Trademark protection is what enables a group of people to join together and be recognized as a common enterprise without fearing that their reputation will be poached by outsiders. Burk and McDonnell (2009) point out that just as patent, copyright, and trade secret protections concern the allocation of information rights between employee and firm, trademark concerns the allocation of good will and reputational rights between employee and firm. Trademarks enable firms to transfer reputational assets over to the firm, and thus deprive individual employees of their ability to hold up the firm over their own reputational assets (pp.…”