F. M. Scherer

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F. M. Scherer is Professor of Public Policy and Corporate Management in the Aetna Chair, Emeritus. From 1974 to 1976, he was chief economist at the Federal Trade Commission. His research specialties are industrial economics and the economics of technological change, leading inter alia to books onIndustrial Market Structure and Economic Performance (third edition with David Ross); The Economics of Multi-Plant Operation: An International Comparisons Study (with three coauthors); International High-Technology Competition; Competition Policies for an Integrated World Economy; Mergers, Sell-offs, and Economic Efficiency (with David J. Ravenscraft); Innovation and Growth: Schumpeterian Perspectives; and The Weapons Acquisition Process(two volumes, one with M. J. Peck).

Papers

  • First Mover Advantages and Optimal Patent Protection 
    by F. M. Scherer
    This paper seeks to advance the theory of patent protection by quantifying approximations to the “first mover advantages” that sustain investment in invention and innovation without formal patent protection. 
  • The Political Economy of Patent Policy Reform in the United States 
    Colorado Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law, v. 7, pp. 167-216.
    By F. M. Scherer
    Abstract: This paper explores a paradox: the extensive tilt toward strengthened patent laws in the United States and the world economy during the 1980s and 1990s, even as economic research was revealing that patents played a relatively unimportant incentive role in most large companies’ research and development investment decisions. It proceeds by tracing the political and evidence-based history of several major initiatives: the Bayh-Dole and Stevenson-Wydler Acts of 1980, the creation of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in 1982, the Hatch-Waxman Act of 1984, changes in antitrust presumptions, and the inclusion of TRIPS provisions in the new international trade rules emerging in 1993 from the Uruguay Round. An excursion follows into the relatively sudden ascent of the term “intellectual property” as a form of propaganda. Suggestions for further policy reforms are offered.
    Review of the paper by Robert M. Hunt and Cecil Quillen