Issue 4

Stuart Graham, Galen Hancock, Alan Marco, and Amanda Fila Myers
This article describes the “USPTO Trademark Case Files Dataset” of trademark applications and registrations derived from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) main database for administering trademark case files. The dataset provides detailed information on 6.7 million trademark applications filed with, or registrations issued by, the USPTO between January 1870 and January 2012, including ownership, mark characteristics, classification, prosecution events, and renewal and maintenance history. This article provides a comprehensive description of the dataset, including discussions of the legal framework affecting and the administrative processes generating these data. We provide a “first look” at the information the dataset captures and present key trends in trademark applications, registrations, and renewals. We highlight data elements valuable to researchers and the general public, and discuss issues that may arise in using these data. In describing these data, we aim to encourage new streams of research on trademarks and what they indicate about their users, the strategies for employing them, and the wider economic impacts that these data will help uncover.

Reut Megidish and Aner Sela
We study all-pay contests with an exogenous minimal effort constraint where a player can participate in a contest only if his effort (output) is equal to or higher than the minimal effort constraint. Contestants are privately informed about a parameter (ability) that affects their cost of effort. The designer decides about the size and number of prizes. We analyze the optimal prize allocation for the contest designer who wishes to maximize either the total effort or the highest effort. It is shown that if the minimal effort constraint is relatively high, the winner-take-all contest in which the contestant with the highest effort wins the entire prize sum does not maximize the expected total effort or the expected highest effort. Rather, a random contest in which the entire prize sum is equally allocated to all the participants yields a higher expected total effort as well as a higher expected highest effort.

Qihong Liu and Konstantinos Serfes
We examine the profitability and welfare implications of targeted price discrimination (PD) in two-sided markets. First, we show that equilibrium discriminatory prices exhibit novel features relative to discriminatory prices in one-sided models and uniform prices in two-sided models. Second, we compare the profitability of perfect PD, relative to uniform prices in a two-sided market. The conventional wisdom from one-sided horizontally differentiated markets is that PD hurts the firms and benefits consumers, prisoners' dilemma. We show that PD, in a two-sided market, may actually soften the competition. Our results suggest that the conventional advice that PD is good for competition based on one-sided markets may not carry over to two-sided markets.

Adolfo de Motta and Jaime Ortega
In this paper, we provide an explanation for why upstream firms merge, highlighting the role of R&D investments and their nature, as well as the role of downstream competition. We show that an upstream merger generates two distinct efficiency gains when downstream competition is not too strong and R&D investments are sufficiently generic: The merger increases R&D investments and decreases wholesale prices. We also show that upstream firms merge unless R&D investments are too specific and downstream competition is neither too weak nor too strong. When the merger materializes, the merger-generated efficiencies pass on to consumers, and thus, consumers can be better off.

Sébastien Mitraille and Michel Moreaux
Two-period Cournot competition between n identical firms producing at constant marginal cost and able to store before selling has pure strategy Nash-perfect equilibria, in which some firms store to exert endogenously a leadership over rivals. The number of firms storing balances market share gains, obtained by accumulating early the output, with losses in margin resulting from increased sales and higher operation costs. This number and the industry inventories are nonmonotonic in n. Concentration (HHI) and aggregate sales increase due to the strategic use of inventories.