Workshop & Lecture Series on the Law & Economics of Innovation

This workshop and lecture series is a joint project of ETH Zurich and the Universities of St. Gallen and Zurich, and is currently organized by Stefan Bechtold, external page Miriam Buiten, external page Andreas Heinemann, external page Peter Picht, external page Mariana Valente, Alexander Stremitzer and Elliott Ash. The series provides an overview of current interdisciplinary research on innovation, intellectual property, antitrust, privacy and technology policy. Scholars from law, economics, management, computer science, psychology and related fields give a lecture and/or present their current research. All speakers are internationally well-known experts from Europe, the U.S., and beyond.

The workshop and lecture series includes a mix of speakers who represent the wide range of current social science research methods applied to innovation, intellectual property, antitrust and technology policy. In particular, theoretical models, empirical and experimental research as well as legal research methods are represented.

The papers presented are available via the course web page. Complementary literature includes:

• William Landes / Richard Posner, The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law, 2003
• Suzanne Scotchmer, Innovation and Incentives, 2004
• Menell, Peter S. / Scotchmer, Suzanne: Intellectual Property Law, in: Polinsky / Shavell (eds.), Handbook of Law and Economics, Volume 2, Amsterdam 2007, pp. 1471-1570
• Bronwyn Hall & Dietmar Harhoff, Recent Research on the Economics of Patents, Annual Review of Economics 4 (2012), 541-565
• Einer Elhauge / Damien Geradin, Global Competition Law and Economics, 2nd edition, 2011
• Martin Peitz / Joel Waldfogel, The Oxford Handbook of the Digital Economy, Oxford 2012
• Stefan Bechtold, external page Law and Economics of Copyright and Trademark on the Internet, in: Durlauf/Blume (eds.), The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, online edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013
• Robert Merges, Economis fo Intellectual Property Law, in Parisi (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Law & Economics, Volume 2, 2017, pp. 200-219
  
• Heidi Williams, How Do Patents Affect Research Investments? Annual Review of Economics 9 (2017), 441-469.
• Ben Depoorter, Peter Menell & David Schwartz (eds)., Research Handbook on the Economics of Intellectual Property, Law, 2019

All events are open to the public.

The workshop and lecture series has been offered every fall semester since 2008. In various years, additional researchers were involved in the organization of the series: Gérard Hertig (2008-2018), Hans Gersbach (2016-2021), Daniel Hürlimann, David Basin, Daniel Chen, Georg von Krogh and Rolf H. Weber.