Package licenses in patent pools with basic and optional patents

Recently, patent pools have been often established by the patent holders in order to promote research and development (R&D) and set technological standards. Patent pools are one of the administration methods for licensing, whereby many patent holders assemble their own patents and the administrator of the patent pools offers the licenses to users. This paper investigates the patent holders' incentive to form a patent pool, the patent pool's licensing behavior, and the anticompetitive effect of a patent pool. Our model is characterized by the following two features. First, we consider different two types of patent: basic and optional. Second, we consider not only a patent pool that offers a single package license, but also a patent pool that offers multiple package licenses. The single package license includes both basic and optional patents in the patent pool. The multiple package licenses involve two licenses: one includes only basic patents, whereas the other includes both basic and optional patents. The results of our analysis yield some implications for a patent pool that is characterized by the strength of complementarity between basic and optional patents.