Abstract: In the context of China's innovation-driven strategy, industry-university-institute cooperation has become an important path to improve China's self-innovation capability. However, due to agent heterogeneity and information asymmetry, corporate parties and academic counterparts may dissent on certain core research and development achievements, namely intellectual property conflicts, which can lead to loss of efficiency and breakdown of cooperation. In this regard, two most controversial value conflicts——value of intellectual property transaction prices and the value of intellectual property rights are selected as pointcut of this paper which involve the core interests in practice of the intellectual property conflict of both parties. In this paper, the optimal division of intellectual property and design of intellectual property transaction contract in industry-university-institute cooperation are analyzed through building reference point contract model based on incomplete contract theory. In this model, asymmetry assumptions of bargaining power, value cognition and reduction behavior of enterprises and institutions are adopted rather than symmetry hypothesis in traditional research because of misaligned reference points. The perspectives of optimal ex ante intellectual property allocation is calculated, ex post self-enforcing price range solution and ex post intellectual property transaction prices selection are solved. Based on the allowable variation range of parameters, the initial value of model parameter is chosen randomly and makes a simulation. Simulation results validate model conclusions.Research suggests that changes in the allocation of innovation intellectual property rights will have an impact on the overall efficiency of the industry-university-research collaboration. Flexible price contract assists ex post prices to vary within self-compliance interval and thus improves ex post efficiency. However, it cannot completely avoid the reduction conducts. Therefore, optimizing the selection of ex post prices is needed to achieve the overall optimal efficiency of industry-university-institute cooperation.The conclusions can be used for solving the core intellectual property conflicts in the industry-university-institute cooperation, as well as the property rights distribution and transaction contract mechanism design of innovation cooperation against the background of subject heterogeneity.

Key words: reference point, industry-university-institute, intellectual property conflict, contract design