Technology licensing partners

While formal economic theory has tended to focus on strategic behavior in technology licensing within a single industry, empirical analysis in this paper shows that transaction and learning cost considerations factor in heavily when choosing technology licensing partners in multi-industry environments. The probability that two companies will engage in a licensing agreement mainly depends on the relationship between the collaborating firms and on their respective characteristics, including the similarity of their market and technological profiles, familiarity through prior interaction, and previous licensing experience, and on the strength of intellectual property protection in the primary industry of the licensor. (C) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.