The Empirical Studies on the relations between firm's standard-setting strategies and patent portfolios

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In this study, I focus the interface standards which play a important roles in the recent information & telecommunication(IT) industries, in order to examine the firm s standard-setting strategies. In the IT industries, because the interface standards are composed of various technological components, the standard-setting strategies are the (ex-ante) coordination of the various technological knowledge between firms. On this respect, I shows that the merger & acquisition activities between hardware firm and software firm play important role in the recent IT industries, and that these M&A have an influence on the firm s standard-setting strategies. Moreover, I pick up the DVD standard-setting case and suggest that the firm s standard-setting strategies depend on the firm s patent-portfolios in this case. More concretely, using the patent-citation data of the U.S. patent database which are provided by Hall, Jaffe & Trajtenberg, I analyze the standard-setting behaviors and the patent portfolios of the related firms. The following two results are derived : (1)the commitment on the former CD format decides the standard-setting behavior on DVD format, (2)the effectiveness of this commitment depends upon the technological assets (which are represented by patent portfolios) of the related firms.