Intellectual property protection and innovation: theoretical and empirical contributions.

Summary This thesis in industrial economics seeks to clarify the strategies of firms in protecting their intellectual property, in order to analyze the consequences of these behaviors in terms of social welfare and impact on competition. The first two empirical articles study the protection of intellectual property by innovative firms in France on the basis of the Community Innovation Survey 4. The analysis uses a bivariate probit model and shows that, in the intermediate goods sector, small innovations have a high probability of being patented, while secrecy is more likely to be used to protect a large innovation than a small innovation. The third paper, "Imitation and Intellectual Property Protection: The Strategic Implications of Damage Rules," examines, in a model-based fashion, how the legal framework imposed on the firm influences its IP protection behavior. The fourth article, "Adoption Strategies with an Imperfectly Competitive Technology Market", relaxes the implicit assumption of perfect competition in the technology market present in Fudenberg and Tirole's (1983) technology adoption model. An upstream firm with market power seeks to capture the profits of downstream firms, for example through the fixed part of a dual tariff. We establish that, when the upstream market is constituted by a monopoly, there is no phenomenon of preemption between downstream firms in equilibrium.