Events

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room E10

Product positioning decisions are important strategic decisions managers make. Will the firm develop "high-end" products, priced above the average product in the marketplace or "low-end" products, priced lower than the average product in the market? We theorize and empricially investigate a high-end bias: the tendency to favor high-end over low-end projects in the absence of objective reasons for doing so. We conducted experimental investigations of managers' explicit versus implicit preferences for high- versus low-end. The core of these experimental studies is the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which analyzes the relative association strength between two constructs in the participant's mind. We find that (1) decision makers implicitly, and without objective justification, prefer high-end over low-end innovation projects, (2) decision maker's implicit high-end bias affects their explicit decisions, and (3) firms introduce more high-end than low-end innovations despite no advantage in revenue.

Contact Person: Dr. Fabian Gaessler

Abstract

Kernpunkte des seit Ende 2009 von beiden Patentstreitkammern des Landgerichts München I praktizierten Münchner Verfahrens zur Stärkung des Patentstandortes München sind die Durchführung zweier Verhandlungstermine in der Sache und ein strenges Fristenregime. Ziel ist es, Patentinhabern in einem fairen und transparenten Verfahren schnellen und effektiven Rechtsschutz bereitzustellen.

Der Referent wird diesen Ansatz sowie dessen praktische Durchführung daraufhin untersuchen, ob sie dem Anspruch beider Parteien auf ein faires Verfahren gerecht werden.

Im Anschluss wird er die im Einvernehmen mit dem neuen Vorsitzenden der 21. Zivilkammer, Tobias Pichlmaier, neu gefassten „Hinweise zum Münchner Verfahren“ vorstellen und erläutern.

Dr. Matthias Zigann ist Vorsitzender Richter am Landgericht München I. Er leitet dort seit Dezember 2012 die 7. Zivilkammer (Patentstreitkammer). Nach seiner Promotion am Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb zum Thema „Entscheidungen inländischer Gerichte über ausländische gewerbliche Schutzrechte und Urheberrechte“ war er vier Jahre lang Staatsanwalt in Landshut, im Anschluss sechs Jahre lang Mitglied der 7. Zivilkammer des Landgerichts München I und zuletzt drei Jahre lang abgeordnet als wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter an den X. Zivilsenat (Patentsenat) des Bundesgerichtshofs in Karlsruhe.

Weitere Informationen finden Sie in dieser Einladung.

Wir bitten um Anmeldung bis zum 23. November unter elisabeth.amler(at)ip.mpg.de.

Abstract:

In this paper I analyze spillover effects on the production of patents following episodes in which superstar inventors relocate to a new city. In particular, in order to distinguish whether local externalities have a restricted network dimension or a wider spatial breadth, I estimate changes in patterns of patenting activity for two different groups of inventors: the restricted group of coauthors of the superstar, and all other inventors in one urban area.

The analysis is performed for both the locality where the superstar moves and the one that is left. I restrict the attention to patent outputs that exclude any joint work with the superstar, so to isolate spillovers from complementarity effects.

The results from the event study evidence a large and persistent positive effect on the coauthors of the superstar who reside in the city of destination (averaging about 0.1 more patents per inventor each year), and a negative trend affecting those who live in the locality of departure. Conversely, no city-wide spillover effect can be attested, offering little support to place-based policies aimed at generating a positive local brain drain.

Contact person: Dr. Fabian Gaessler

Both organizational and sociological approaches in entrepreneurship research highlight the importance of social context ins haping individual preferences for entrepreneurship. An influential contextual factor that has not been studied in entrepreneurship research is one's boss at work. Do entrepreneurial bosses contribute to their employees' decisions to become entrepreneurs themselves? Using Danish register data of newly founded firms and their entrepreneurs and employees between 2003 and 2012, and employing methods that allow causal inferences, we show that entrepreneurial bosses indeed affect their employees' future entrepenruship choices, especially if both boss and employees are female. We investigate two alternative underlying mechanisms that may shape the (female) boss' influence on (female) workers' entrepreneurship decisions. Our resuls consistently suggest that entrepreneurial bosses may act as role models for the entrepreneurship activities of their employees, especially between pairs of female bosses and female employees. We do no find any evidence on female bosses acting as "queen bees" at the workplace. Female entrepreneurial bosses may, thus, act as a lever to reducing the gender gaps in entrepreneurship rates.

Nachdem im Kartellrechts-Zyklus Vertikalthemen und insbesondere der Online-Handel zuletzt aus rechtlicher Sicht beleuchtet wurden, soll die Diskussion mit der ökonomischen Perspektive zu dem Thema abgerundet werden. Wir laden herzlich zum nächsten Kartellrechtsvortrag vom Referenten Thilo Kraus, Executive Vice President bei Compass Lexecon in London und Düsseldorf, zum Thema "Wettbewerbsfolgen von Beschränkungen des Internetvertriebs – ökonomische Grundlagen" ein.

Die Aktuelle Viertelstunde wird Dr. Andreas Boos, Special Counsel by Milbank in München, zum Thema “ ‘Fair Trial’ in Bundeskartellamtsverfahren? – Aktuelle Rechtsfragen zu einem transparenten, objektiven und fairen Verfahren vor dem Bundeskartellamt” bestreiten.

Wir freuen uns auf Ihr Kommen und bitten um Anmeldung bis 2. November 2016 bei Frau Delia Zirilli unter delia.zirilli(at)ip.mpg.de.

On Friday, 4 November 2016, the 4th Crowdinvesting Symposium „Financial Decision Making and the Internet“ takes place at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition.

In 2016, the topic of the symposium is ”Financial Decision Making and the Internet“. The following research areas will be covered: Entrepreneurial Finance, Reward-Based and Equity Crowdfunding, Social Trading, Personal Financial Management, Robo Advice, Block Chain and Virtual Currencies.

The symposium offers academics and practitioners a platform to exchange ideas about the latest developments in this field as well as for networking. Moreover, it is a forum for the information of legislators on the European and national level on a scientific basis and with regard to new legislative proposals or legal reform projects.

Symposium Agenda

• 8:30 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. – Academic Session (invitation only)
• 4:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. – Arrival and Registration Public Session
• 4:30 p.m. - 4:40 p.m. – Latest Findings of the DFG Group on Crowdinvesting – Lars Hornuf (University of Trier and Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition)
• 4:40 p.m. - 5:15 p.m. – Keynote – Ethan Mollick (Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania)
• 5:15 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. – Panel Discussion – including Claas Ludwig (Federal Ministry of Finance), Ethan Mollick (Wharton School), Daniel Halmer (raisin), Erik Podzuweit (Scalable Capital), Andrea Rexer (Süddeutsche Zeitung)
• 7:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. – Get-Together

^{The symposium will be held in English.}

Registration
Registration for the public part of the symposium from 4 p.m.

Academic Workshop Agenda
To the Agenda 
To the Call for Papers

For further information, please contact Matthias Schmitt.

Abstract:

The digital economy is characterized by the use of intellectual property such as software, patents and trademarks. The pricing of such intangibles is widely used to shift profits to low-tax countries. We analyze the role of a source tax on royalty payments for abusive transfer pricing, and optimal tax policy. First, we show that mispricing of royalty payments does not affect investment behavior by multinationals.

Second, it is in the vast majority of cases not optimal for a government to set the source tax equal to the corporate tax rate. The reason is that shutting down abusive transfer pricing activities needs to be traded off against mitigating the corporate tax distortion in capital investment. The latter can be achieved by some tax deductibility of royalty payments. If the true arm’s length transfer price equals zero or for special corporate tax systems that treat debt and equity alike (i.e., for ACE and CBIT), it will be optimal to equate both tax rates.

Paper can be accessed at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2839756