Economics of litigating IP (or is that just patents?)

Both proactive and defensive  options  
can be expensive  and labour-intensive 
 for IP litigants ...

With apologies if you have already seen this on the IPKat weblog, here's a link to Nicola Searle's Katonomics post last night on the economics of intellectual property litigation. As is immediately apparent from Nicola's post, most of the data on which economists work is (i) drawn from patent litigation, since it is in numerical terms the most prevalent form of IP litigation and (ii) based on the data available in the United States.

Among the things that might particularly interest the patent-litigating reader of this weblog are the references to game theory as a means of assessing the basis on which to progress and/or settle a dispute and the question whether -- when so much information is available to both sides in a dispute -- one might expect more of them to settle without the need to go to court.

These and other matters are topics on which PatLit will be delighted to hear from readers. If anyone would like to write a critique of Nicola's post which this weblog can host, can such person please email me here and let me know.