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Chinese Journal of Management Science ›› 2021, Vol. 29 ›› Issue (6): 91-104.doi: 10.16381/j.cnki.issn1003-207x.2018.0851

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Patent Technical Authorization, Production Outsourcing and Contracts Design

JIN Liang1, ZHENG Ben-rong2, ZHOU Nan3   

  1. 1. School of Economics and Management, Nanchang University, Nanchang 330031, China;
    2. College of Economics & Management, Huazhong Agriculture University, Wuhan 430070, China;
    3. Shanghai Lixin University of Accounting and Finance, Shanghai 201620, China
  • Received:2018-06-14 Revised:2018-10-30 Published:2021-06-29

Abstract: Since reform and opening up, with the constant deepening of people's right consciousness, the consciousness of intellectual property protection permeates gradually every field of our lives. To strengthen the protection and application capacity of intellectual property as well as improve the creative awareness of science and technology are significant develop our national economy, and encourage scientific research. Patent licensing and authorization agreements are key to turning intellectual property into actual productivity. Along with the rapid development of technology and increasing degrees of product complexity, technology licensing has being widely used to commercialize firms' achievements of innovations. In this paper, we considered a two-stage game in a supply chain formed of a patent owner, a branded manufacturer and an original equipment manufacturer (OEM). In the first stage, the patent owner license its technology to the branded manufacturer, which is outsourcing production to the OEM in the second stage.
The main work in this paper includes four parts. At first, optimal licensing contract is proposed and the optimal pricing strategies and optimal order quantity under full information and asymmetric information are analyzed, respectively. Second, on this basis, the effects of scale economies effect on the equilibriums are analyzed, and consequently the optimal pricing, order quantity and contract design of supply chain members under different types of market demand are compared. Third, to address the value of scale economies effect of OEM, the optimal decisions of supply chain's enterprises, and the changing of profit of supply chain members, consumer surplus and social welfare in different situations are compared. Finally, the optimal decisions of supply chain's enterprises, and the changing of consumer surplus and social welfare under full and asymmetric information are compared. And the effect of different types of market demand and asymmetric information on willingness to share information and negotiation behaviors is presented.
The results show that, the model designs a patent license agreement which meets participation constraint and incentive compatibility constraint to screen the market demand information from the patent owner point of view. By solving the optimization problem, the optimal pricing, order quantity and licensing contract design for supply chain members are presented under asymmetric information, respectively. Further, it is found that the OEM will receive more profit due to the economies of scale, but it may not decrease the consumer surplus and the social welfare. In conclusion, the existence of asymmetry information leads to the change of the supply chain's enterprises' profit and the whole supply chain' profit, while the asymmetry information may not decrease the consumer surplus. Moreover, when the patent owner's bargaining power satisfy certain conditions, the branded manufacturer will reveal the private information voluntarily and share the supply chain's profit with patent owner.
In summary, the value of scale economies effect under asymmetric information is investigated. Moreover, the licensing contract are used to coordinating the tech supply chain under asymmetric information, which offers a practical and a theoretical guidance to improve the value of tech supply chain.

Key words: patent technical authorization, production outsourcing, production economy, contracts design

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