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Chinese Journal of Management Science ›› 2024, Vol. 32 ›› Issue (3): 198-209.doi: 10.16381/j.cnki.issn1003-207x.2021.2311

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Optimal Licensing Contracts of Technology Supply Chain with Patent Protection

Guanghua Xie1,Zhilin Qiao2(),Lin Chen3   

  1. 1.School of Business, Xi’an University of Finance and Economics, Xi’an 710100, China
    2.School of Economics and Finance, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710061, China
    3.School of Management, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710072, China
  • Received:2021-11-08 Revised:2022-07-30 Online:2024-03-25 Published:2024-03-25
  • Contact: Zhilin Qiao E-mail:zqiao@mail.xjtu.edu.cn

Abstract:

With the rapid growth of international trade, technology licensing cooperation between enterprises is becoming more and more popular. However, in the process of transnational technology licensing, unreasonable licensing contracts make it easy for the companies to occur patent infringement disputes. In this context, the following questions are studied: 1) in transnational technology licensing, how should the licensor design and choose the form of the technology license contract? 2) How should production diseconomies of licensee and information asymmetry affect the design of technology license contract for licensor? 3) How should the design of technology license contract and the domestic enterprise's production diseconomies affect social welfare? Taking the foreign enterprise as licensor and the domestic enterprise as licensee, production scale diseconomy of domestic enterprise and information asymmetry about market demand are taken into account, and then games with incomplete information are constructed to investigate the optimal design of transnational technology licensing contract problem. On this basis, the conditions for choosing the form of transnational technology licensing contract are analyzed, and the influence of production scale diseconomy of domestic enterprise on social welfare is investigated.By solving and analyzing the constructed model, the optimal technology licensing contract and output decision under pooling equilibrium and separating equilibrium are found. Firstly, compared with the only choice of two-tariff contract to technology licensing under the pooling equilibrium, the foreign enterprise can strategically design fixed-fee contract or two-tariff contract under the separating equilibrium; Secondly, the production diseconomies of the domestic enterprise does not affect the choice of license form of the foreign enterprise, but it will prompt the domestic enterprise to reduce the output of the product and increase the price of the product. Moreover, the impact of production diseconomies on the performance of technical supply chain members depends on market conditions, but it always leads to the loss of consumer surplus and social welfare. Finally, the domestic enterprise's production outsourcing and the domestic enterprise's production economies of scale are considered to expand the analysis of this paper. The results show that, the domestic enterprise's production outsourcing and the domestic enterprise's production economies of scale will not affect the patent licensing form choice of the patent provider. Nevertheless, the impact of production outsourcing on the equilibrium of technology supply chain is uncertain, and scale economies will bring positive externalities to technology supply chain, that is the profit levels of the domestic enterprise and the foreign enterprise will increase.This paper also has some limitations. In order to focus on the design of transnational technology licensing contracts, the description of information asymmetry in domestic market demand is simplified. Therefore, when studying the problems of technology licensing in the supply chain, more influencing factors can be further considered, and the continuous random function can be used to describe information asymmetry in product market demand or disruption in demand/supply.

Key words: licensing contract, asymmetric information, production diseconomies, social welfare

CLC Number: