Events

Moderation: Francisco Beneke

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Room 313 

While data interoperability solutions will certainly consist on a combination of these three paths, the intended workshop focuses primarily on the role that both data standards and APIs play in achieving IoT data interoperability. By exchanging views with business, data and standardization experts in the IoT field, the workshop should provide us with the necessary technical and market knowledge to assess the economic, legal and regulatory implications of data standardization and the emerging “API economy”.

Each workshop will address the different kinds of standards which in the Institute’s view are relevant for the IoT. The focus of the second workshop will be the IoT data interoperability.

The workshop will be held at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition. Participation is by invitation only.

See Program

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

We provide a practitioner's view on the economics of licensing standard-essential patents and related issues of standard development. Based on a presentation of the paper "Over-Declaration of Standard Essential Patents and Determinants of Essentiality", recent industry developments, contrast practical experiences, and the economic literature will be discussed, and potential topics for future research will be raised. Timo Ali-Vehmas, Nokia head of ecosystems research and former VP, compatibility and industry collaboration, will join for the presentation.

On this day, visitors can ask the researchers questions, can be explained what patent, trademark, copyright and antitrust law or innovation and entrepreneurship is, can live research in the laboratory experience, have a look at the impressive architecture of the house or visit the unique library.

Link to the program

Moderation: Daria Kim

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Room 313 

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

Family background matters for entrepreneurship; however, the focus on factors making siblings similar rather than different may hide important sources of heterogeneity and understate the total importance of families. In a set of causal exercises using Swedish register data, I assess the differential effects of birth order, family size, and sibling sex composition on entrepreneurship. These factors appear to have a negligible impact. While later born men are more likely to become unincorporated entrepreneurs, this effect is largely explained by their lower education, pointing towards the subsistence nature of this type of entrepreneurship. I find no evidence of causal family size effects in linear and non-linear instrumental variable approaches, although there is a small negative effect of having a brother on the father-daughter association in unincorporated entrepreneurship. Finally, neither source of within-family heterogeneity exhibits a clear relationship with incorporated entrepreneurship. The results are consistent with the absence of adult sibling peer effects in entrepreneurship and confirm the role of families in generating sibling similarities, not differences. The importance of family background for entrepreneurship is therefore only marginally understated, and accounting for within-family differences increases previously estimated sibling correlations by little.

Contact Person: Laura Rosendahl Huber, Ph.D.

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

In its 2017 Lilly v Actavis decision, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom decided to alter the way in which questions of patent claim construction and infringement are dealt with under UK law. A doctrine of equivalents is back again in England. In this seminar Mr Justice Birss will seek to explain the implications of this decision and what may be some of the difficulties which the courts will have to grapple with as a result. A fundamental question relates to the interaction between validity and this new approach. Or to pose the question another way: is Lilly v Actavis a decision about claim scope in general or infringement in particular?

Dr. Klaus Bacher, Richter am Bundesgerichtshof, wird im Anschluss die Grundgedanken der Äquivalenzlehre in Deutschland aufzeigen und auf die Entwicklung der Rechtsprechung hierzulande eingehen.

Zur Erleichterung unserer Vorbereitungen bitten wir um Anmeldung bis Freitag, den 7. September 2018 per E-Mail an elisabeth.amler(at)ip.mpg.de

On Friday, 20 July 2018, the 6th Crowdinvesting Symposium „Blockchain and Initial Coin Offerings“ takes place at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition. The annual event was initiated by Prof. Dr. Lars Klöhn, Humboldt University Berlin, and Prof. Dr. Lars Hornuf, University of Bremen. It was first organized in February 2013 at the Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) Munich.

Since April 2016, Prof. Dr. Lars Hornuf is Affiliated Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition within the scope of the research project "Crowdinvesting in Germany, England and the USA: Regulatory Perspectives and Welfare Implications of a New Financing Scheme" which is funded by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).

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. For this purposes, each year a priority topic is defined which covers current issues of crowdinvesting from an economic and legal perspective. The findings of the symposia are published in high-ranking scientific journals.

See Program

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

Abstract:
The digitization of economic activity has important socio-economic development implications and at the same time creates challenges for antitrust analysis. These implications and challenges have been met differently in jurisdictions around the world.  We analyze the different experiences in the EU and developing countries, focusing on mobile payments. We find that this market exhibits special characteristics that need to be taken into account in the analysis of competition conditions. First, it is enabled by mobile telecommunications infrastructure and is offered by network operators, which causes competition in both markets to be closely linked. Second, there is still regulatory arbitrage which potentially favors mobile payments. Third, there are factors, such as the lack of interoperability and geographical reach, that make network effects in this industry different from those present in other platforms. Fourth, since mobile payments in developing countries serve a niche—the population underserved by mainstream banking—the definition of the relevant market is not straightforward. We propose the criteria to be applied when making such definition. Finally, since mobile payments have associated financial services, there is an interaction between competition and financial stability that needs to be considered.

Note: This seminar will be of interdisciplinary character and follow a novel format – following a 30min introductory presentation by Jörg and Paco, we will focus on the economic aspects of the project during the discussion.

Contact: Zhaoxin Pu

Moderation: Dr. Natale Rampazzo