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Construction disputes can often be resolved using several techniques including: negotiation; mediation; dispute resolution boards; arbitration; and litigation. Negotiation is considered the most preferred technique due to the following facts: first it prevents litigation amongst project parties; and second it keeps a harmonious relationship between project participants. Further, negotiation saves the time, expenses and efforts that are associated with other resolutions techniques. The purpose of this paper is to provide a tool that is geared towards assisting construction contractors during negotiation process.

The framework consists of three modules; duration, certainty and intention. These modules capture the main characteristics of the negotiation process including: the expected claim duration in the case of litigation; certainty of litigation; and contactor's intention to make litigation. The paper also describes the characteristics of these three modules and their associated factors which have been determined based on interviews with claims' experts and questionnaire surveys. Analytical hierarchy process and utility theory are used to determine weights and utility values of attributes, respectively. Decision tree analysis is used to estimate the equivalent monetary value of litigation.

The framework calculates the lower threshold of a claim value with an average error of 12 per cent. A case study is presented to illustrate the practical use of the proposed framework and its ability to determine the minimum acceptable claim amount.

The knowledge of the framework was retrieved from the Egyptian construction industry. However, the utilized methodology can be applied to capture local contraction practices, law and politics in other construction industries.

This paper presents a framework that is developed to assist contractors in calculating the lower threshold of a claim value, which can be considered, during negotiation process with owners.

Patent litigation consists of non-market actions that firms undertake to access intellectual property rights defined by prior legislation and enforced by the courts. Thus, patent litigation provides an interesting context in which to explore aspects of firm’s non-market strategies. In contrast with prior non-market strategy research that has largely focused on how political institutions define the rules of the game for market competition, non-market actions within patent litigation primarily seek to access and apply these broad policies to specific situations, products, or assets that matter to the firm. Furthermore, because such non-market actions are directly influenced by the firms’ market strategies, they represent a promising area for research on integrated (market and non-market) strategies as well.

The goal of this paper is to explain how generic patent strategies that firms use to support their competitive advantage in the product-market influence non-market outcomes related to the timing of patent litigation resolution. In contrast with prior research that has studied settlement in patent litigation essentially as a one-shot bargaining game, this paper seeks to explain litigation resolution as an outcome of the competing mechanisms of settlement and adjudication that operate continually during litigation. Using a large sample of patent litigations in research medicines and computers, I model the timing of patent litigation resolution in a proportional hazards framework, wherein settlement and adjudication are competing risks. The evidence found is consistent with the proposition that the speed with which patent litigation is resolved by either settlement or adjudication reflects the use of proprietary, defensive, and leveraging patent strategies by firms. These findings also help to explain unexpected and anomalous findings regarding the settlement of patent litigation reported in prior research.

Supermaxes across the United States detain thousands in long-term solitary confinement, under conditions of extreme sensory deprivation. Almost every state built a supermax between the late 1980s and the late 1990s. This chapter examines the role of federal prisoners’ rights litigation in the 1960s and 1970s in shaping the prisons, especially supermaxes, built in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States. This chapter uses a systematic analysis of federal court case law, as well as archival research and oral history interviews with key informants, including lawyers, experts, and correctional administrators, to explore the relationship between federal court litigation and prison building and designing. This chapter argues that federal conditions of confinement litigation in the 1960s and 1970s (1) had a direct role in shaping the supermax institutions built in the subsequent decades and (2) contributed to the resistance of these institutions to constitutional challenges. The history of litigation around supermaxes is an important and as-yet-unexplored aspect of the development of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence in the United States over the last half century.

Patent litigation has been rising rapidly in the United States since the mid-1980s, and particularly so in high-technology industries. The strategies pursued by firms with their patents have a significant influence on their decisions to file suit, and on the outcomes within litigation. The influence of strategic motivations on settlement outcomes is studied in two illustratively different industries – computers and research medicines. Evidence is found for two types of influences – the use of patents (as isolating mechanisms) to protect valuable strategic stakes, and their “defensive” role in obtaining access to external technologies (through mutual hold-up).

We study how different rules for allocating litigation costs impact on royalty negotiation when a non-practicing patent holder asserts its patent against a product developer.

A theoretical framework is proposed which distinguishes between three legal-cost allocation systems: the American system, where each party bears its own costs; the British system, where the loser incurs all costs; and the system favoring the defendant, where the defendant pays its own costs if it loses and nothing otherwise. The model considers both flat lawyer fees and contingency fees.

We first determine conditions under which, in the assumed contexts, the American system is preferable to the British one. Successively, we show that the less usual system favoring the defendant proves to be an interesting alternative.

In this way, in addition to extend the standard model of patent holdup, we furnish an analytical treatment of recent legislative proposals, such as the Saving High-Tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes (SHIELD) Act of 2013.

In this chapter, the options for funding large‐scale corruption actions for the recovery of assets and the seizure of assets as part of civil claims for damages for human rights abuse are considered. We have sought to set out our understanding of particular funding mechanisms which are either available to be used in England and Wales or are available in other jurisdictions and thus could potentially be made available in England and Wales.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of common ownership on corporate innovation, including innovation input, innovation output and postgrant patents.

This paper uses the ordinary least square model and the difference-in-differences technique to evaluate the effect of institutional interlocking shareholdings on the life cycle of corporate innovation.

The results show that common ownership impedes innovation measured by patent grants and citations through reduced R&D expenditures. However, common ownership protects postgrant patents by lowering the likelihood that a co-owned firm gets involved in patent litigation and by accelerating the settlement of lawsuits between co-owned firms.

From a regulatory perspective, common ownership in younger firms that rely heavily on R&D investment to produce innovation outputs is detrimental and needs to be regulated. However, common ownership in mature firms, which hold a big pool of patents or rely on acquiring patents to compete, is of less concern because of the protective role detected.

The paper provides a first comprehensive look into how same-industry common ownership affects innovation input, innovation output and postgrant patents. The research also reconciles the anticompetitive effect and the coordinative effect of common ownership documented in the literature.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether repeated alliances between two members of a patent pool boost enterprise innovation. Furthermore, this paper intends to determine whether the innovation performance becomes higher or lower based on the partnership characteristics.

In this empirical study, hierarchical regression is used to analyze the longitudinal data obtained from 12 patent pools managed by MPEG LA during a time period ranging from 2006 to 2018. The members of patent pools comprise research institutions, firms and universities. Research analyses are performed based on a sample of 68,400 member pairs who had established repeated alliances. The information regarding such pairs is gathered from public databases.

Repeated alliances positively correlate with enterprise innovation performance in patent pools; this performance is higher when the two enterprises have exploratory collaborations. Conversely, the performance is lower when the partners have a similar technology base and are engaged in a technological competition (competitive learning and patent litigation). Moreover, the performance is lower when one partner demonstrates higher network centrality and richer structural holes than the other partner.

Patent pools play an instrumental role in eliminating patent-licensing barriers, thereby allowing mutual acquisition of complementary technologies, and cooperatively strengthening technology development. From the perspective of theories of coopetition, knowledge management and social network, this study explores the impact of patent pools on enterprise innovation performance and ascertains the moderating roles of technology coopetition, technology similarity and network position, thereby expanding the scope of innovation effect in the context of patent pools.

This issue of Research in Law and Economics covers several areas of important research by a variety of international scholars. It contains technical papers on the appropriate way to estimate damages in patent disputes, as well as methods for evaluating relevant markets and vertically integrated firms when determining the competitive effects of mergers and other actions. There are also papers on the implication of different legal processes, regulations, and liability rules on consumer welfare, which range from the impact of delays in legal decisions in labor cases in France to issues of criminal liability related to the use of artificial intelligence.