Managing Licensing in a Market for Technology
研究大公司内部技术许可活动的组织方式，比较分权与集权两种模式，发现分权下业务单元因激励不足会放弃有价值的许可机会，而业务单元间的相互依赖反而可能促进分权。
Technology licensing is an important means for companies to extract more value from their intellectual assets. We build a model that helps understand how licensing activity should be organized within large corporations. More specifically, we compare decentralization—where the business unit using the technology makes licensing decisions—to centralized licensing. The business unit has superior information about licensing opportunities but may not have the appropriate incentives because its rewards depend on product market performance. If licensing is decentralized, the business unit forgoes valuable licensing opportunities because the rewards for licensing are (optimally) weaker than those for product market profits. This distortion is stronger when production-based incentives, especially private benefits, of business unit managers are more powerful, making centralization more attractive. Surprisingly, we find that interdependency across business units may result in more, not less, decentralization. Furthermore, even though centralization results in less information, centralized licensing deals are larger. Our model conforms to the existing evidence that reports heterogeneity across firms in both licensing propensity and organization of licensing. This paper was accepted by Bruno Cassiman, business strategy.