The Group

The Intellectual Property Group at the Center for Law & Economics at ETH Zurich studies how intellectual property, law & technology – including Internet law, AI & Law, privacy law, and telecommunications law – and antitrust law shape innovation, markets, and institutional governance in the digital age.

Although these fields are central to contemporary innovation policy, their theoretical foundations and real-world effects remain deeply contested. The Intellectual Property Group addresses this challenge by using advanced social science methods to address pressing questions in current intellectual property, law & technology, and antitrust debates. In close collaboration with economists, computer scientists, and data scientists, the group conducts large-scale data analyses, experimental laboratory studies, online experiments, field experiments, and qualitative interview studies to understand how legal rules influence human and firm behavior and to draw policy conclusions on the optimal design of intellectual property and digital market regulation. The group explores how to regulate the digital economy at scale, and how advances in artificial intelligence are reshaping foundational concepts of intellectual property law and market regulation more generally.

The Intellectual Property Group co-​organizes the Workshop & Lecture Series on the Law & Economics of Innovation, which regularly brings internationally leading scholars to Zurich.