Research Overview
The Intellectual Property Group at the Center for Law & Economics at ETH Zurich investigates the design of intellectual property law, law & technology (Internet law, privacy law, automated decision-making, legal tech), and antitrust law. Although these areas of the law are at the heart of innovation policy debates, their theoretical underpinnings are often fiercely debated and only partially understood.
The Intellectual Property Group addresses this challenge by using advanced social science methods to address pressing questions of current intellectual property, law & technology and antitrust debates. The group conducts large-scale data analyses, experimental lab studies, online experiments, field experiments and qualitative interview studies to identify the impact of legal institutions on human behavior and to draw policy conclusions on the optimal design of legal institutions. The group also applies machine-learning and natural-language processing tools to intellectual property law and beyond. In a collaboration that includes computer scientists and economists, the group explores how to regulate the digital economy at scale, where regulators face thousands of content providers and millions of consumers.
The group co-organizes the Workshop & Lecture Series on the Law & Economics of Innovation, which regularly brings internationally leading scholars to Zurich.
Lawyers, economists and psychologists have developed and refined theories of creativity, innovation and intellectual property protection for centuries. Current standard models of intellectual property protection are based on certain assumptions of how inventors, creators and artists interact with the intellectual property system and how their activities are shaped by incentives. Using social science methods on experiments in the lab, the field and on the Internet, the Intellectual Property Group intends to validate and expand our understanding of how intellectual property protection interacts with human behavior.
We live in a world in which large amounts of personal information are constantly gathered, combined, processed, and analyzed, sometimes without our explicit knowledge and consent. The justification and scope of privacy protection differs greatly across countries. The Intellectual Property Group explores the effect of privacy protection on compliance, competition, and global data markets. Together with computer scientists, we design automated tools for monitoring the online world, analyzing how firm and human behavior interacts with digital regulations in privacy, antitrust, contract law and beyond. We explore how to regulate the digital economy at scale, where regulators face thousands of content providers and millions of consumers.
Many decisions with potentially significant legal and economic consequences on people's lives are taken with the help of machine learning and natural language processing techniques. This creates new challenges to fundamental values protected by the legal system, while at the same time promising more efficient and sometimes more objective ways of decision-making. The Intellectual Property Group uses experiments in the lab and the field to explore how human beings react to automated decisions, and to generate insights on how to shape automated decision-making processes from a public policy perspective. The Intellectual Property Group also collaborates with data scientists to create natural language-processing systems analyzing and predicting decisions in intellectual property, privacy law and beyond.
For more information on the research interests of individual group members, please click here.