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Several recent technological standards were accompanied by patent pools—arrangements to license relevant intellectual property as a package. A key distinction made by regulators—between patents essential to a standard and patents with substitutes—has not been addressed in the theoretical literature. I show that pools of essential patents are always welfare increasing, while pools which include nonessential patents can be welfare reducing—even pools limited to complementary patents and stable under compulsory individual licensing. If pools gain commitment power and price as Stackelberg leaders, this reduces, and can reverse, the gains from welfare-increasing pools. (JEL D43, D45, K21, L13, L24, O34)

When selling a business by auction, sellers typically use indicative bids—nonbinding preliminary bids—to select a small number of bidders to conduct due diligence and submit binding offers. We show that if entry into the auction is costly, indicative bids can be informative: symmetric equilibrium exists in weakly increasing strategies, with bidders “pooling” over a finite number of bids. The equilibrium helps the seller select high value bidders with higher likelihood, although the highest value bidders are not always selected. When the number of potential bidders is large, revenue and total surplus are both higher than when entry is unrestricted. (JEL D44, D83)

This paper presents a new non-cooperative approach to multilateral bargaining. We consider a demand game with the following additional ingredients: (i) There is an exogenous deadline, by which bargaining has to end; (ii) Prior to the deadline, players may sequentially change their demands as often as they like; (iii) Changing one's demand is costly, and this cost increases as the deadline gets closer. The game has a unique subgame perfect equilibrium prediction in which agreement is reached immediately and switching costs are avoided. Moreover, this equilibrium is invariant to the particular order and timing in which players make demands. This is important, as multilateral bargaining models are sometimes too sensitive to these particular details. In our context, players with higher concession costs obtain higher shares of the pie; their increased bargaining power stems from their ability to credibly commit to a demand earlier. We discuss how the setup and assumptions are a reasonable description for certain real bargaining situations.

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